– Steve Hitchen
Air shows are hard work, and even the most successful ones bring a lot of heartache for the organisers. Ask Mark Bright. He has overseen Wings over Illawarra for years, and each time he hasn't known if all his sweat, tears and worry will actually pay off. On several occasions it hasn't. This year, it did. Despite threats of Wagnerian weather and radars showing widespread showers marching down on Shellharbour Airport from the west, Bright and his team put on a great air show that looked seamless from the crowdline. They deserved a good year and they got one. Of course, like all air shows, there were the back-room hiccups, but it's the mark of good air show organisation that the people at the fence don't ever know that. WOI has become one of the most important events on the annual aviation calendar, and it would do the wider GA industry well to understand that and get in behind Mark Bright and his team. I was pleased to be able to get out and about talking to people, and to grab some time to just be one of the crowd and enjoy watching some very professional flying. Congratulations to everyone involved in the show; you all did aviation proud.
If you heard a loud thump coming from the AOPA hangar at Bankstown during the AGM, I suggest it was probably the sound of a very large penny hitting the deck as the committee realise they have a problem: their product offering. Membership in the association has been on the decline for some years, not helped in the slightest by the impacts of the pandemic. AOPA has been focused so intently on the hard slog of advocacy that they haven't realised that they need to be much more to aviation than a lobby group. Advocacy is critical to what they do, but it's not the main reason that people join associations. They do it for the sense of belonging and pride in that belonging. They do it for the magazine that tells them what they are a part of, they do it for the discounts the membership card attracts; they do it for the events. This is all part of being an association. Advocacy is, by its very nature, political, and some pilots just don't want to be political. So I am pleased to see that AOPA has now appointed a membership manager to look after the members whilst the CEO continues fighting the good fights in Canberra. President Shaun Kelly outlined to the membership the measures the board had to take in order to survive the impacts of COVID, including revealing that CEO Ben Morgan was actually working for nothing. I have to commend Morgan for doing that. Even if his approach to advocacy is not the way you would do it, his passion to keep working away without pay is admirable. However, it would be a very cruel person indeed to expect Morgan to do that for much longer. The membership needs to recover as the association gets its mojo back and the product offering reverts to a better match for the GA community.
Aviation in Victoria and southern NSW is in a somewhat depressed state at the moment thanks to the long and winding Winter that has managed to usurp Spring. Weather is always an issue in aviation even when the forecast says CAVOK, so we're used to that. What we're not used to is long relentless rain and weather patterns that seems to defy convention. That makes life for a GA pilot somewhat unpreditable and complex; things we naturally eschew if we have the chance. To our benefit is that we have at our hands all sorts of information channels that help us make decisions in the air. EFBs, weather cameras, the BOM radar, iPad apps like Windy ... things the aviators of yesterday would have given anything for. These are our weapons to stay safe in this Spring of discontent, provided we use them to their fullest. If it's not in your nature to access and digest info in this way, button-hole an instructor and get yourself clued-up now. There has probably never been a time before that we have needed technology more than today.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch