It’s early in the year, and a great time to chart our course forward. There’s a sense of optimism returning to the general aviation community and we at AOPA want to build on it.
I recently spent several days at Flight Safety International for some recurrent training, and I was pleased to see the facility busy with pilots honing their skills. Pilots who train are pilots who fly. And that’s a promising sign—one that’s backed by FAA statistics showing that flying hours are on the rise in some segments of GA.
And we’ve seen other impressive signs as well. Nearly 10,000 people attended AOPA Aviation Summit in November. And another 10,000 discovered AOPA’s Lifestyles Collection in its first month in operation. The Lifestyles Collection lets you buy the things you already purchase while benefiting AOPA—all at no cost to you or to the association.
Even so, we’ve got a long way to go before we see general aviation grow to its full potential. So this year, AOPA will work to support and build momentum for the positive trends that are beginning to emerge.
AOPA and the AOPA Foundation will be continuing efforts to improve the flight training paradigm so more students finish training and earn pilot certificates. The Flight Training Student Retention Initiative is off to a good start, but we will be holding more summits, refining our findings, and sharing what we learn throughout the year. We want the flight training experience to be better, and we’re working with experts from all areas of aviation to make it happen.
Our ability to make change for the better depends on our ability to communicate what we’re learning, and at AOPA we are fortunate to have wonderful communication tools in place. Some 120,000 people read Flight Training magazine, and the majority of our 410,000 members read AOPA Pilot each month. About 300,000 people read the weekly ePilot newsletters and 200,000 read AOPA’s Aviation eBrief each weekday. Add to that the nearly 1 million people who’ve spent more than 68,000 hours watching AOPA Live’s online programming in the past year and you’ve got quite a communications network.
AOPA’s job in 2011 will be to use that network to Rally GA.
Rally GA is an opportunity for us to share the many good-news stories that are happening all over general aviation—and a great way to support the recovery now budding in general aviation.
We’ll be discussing new thinking about flight training, opportunities for GA to benefit from air traffic modernization, progress on finding a replacement for leaded fuel, efforts to grow our general aviation airports, and ongoing work to enhance pilot safety.
I hope you’ll join us as we Rally GA. Together we can chart the best course forward, and help general aviation climb to new heights.
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