First Board Meeting & Agenda

The club had it’s first board meeting this past Thursday where I was (finally) able to attend. There were approximately fifteen of us in the room. The meetings are typically held, once a month, on the first level of the DuPage Airport Terminal Building. It’s a very nice building with all cutting edge technology like Wi-Fi, projectors, etc. The content of these meetings are pretty structured, with presentations concerning membership numbers, the finances of the club and how much money was spent on various expensive in the last month, and finally the maintenance department, with an outline on what sorts of issues were reported concerning any of our three aircraft, and steps taken to fix the identified problems. Also, discussion concerning Annual inspections, engine overhauls, and ADS-B installations are presented in this phase of the meeting as well.

After all the mandatory meeting items were addressed, a majority of the remainder of time was diverted to discussing the details and process of acquiring our fourth aircraft. As I may have eluded to in previous posts, our club is nearing the membership capacity for three aircraft. Our current membership size is 55 members. The maximum limit is 20 members per aircraft. We’re 5 members away from capacity, and the bylaws state that over 60 members, we’d be required to acquire a fourth airplane. Now there are many differing opinions concerning exactly what fourth airplane the club should acquire. I’ve heard discussions concerning a Piper Dakota, RV-12, Diamond DA-40 or DA-20, or even another Archer III. As is to be expected, dissent is rampant.

Our Club President performed some neat data analysis techniques to identify three “groups” of members for focus group meetings. These three “clusters” partionined club members into the number of hours they have logged with the club in the last year. It’s obvious to me that members who fly more hours in the club should have a more significant “say” in the type of aircraft we acquire, since a majority of the club’s operating expenses are paid primarily by these high-hour flying members. It makes 0 sense to listen to someone who screams “GET A CESSNA” fifteen times at a club meeting, but has logged approximately 2 hours in any of the club aircraft over the last year!

We intend to perform these small focus group meetings to identify the needs and requirements of our members, so as to better gauge what type of aircraft we should be focusing our attention on. Once we hold these focus group sessions with the three groups of members, we’ll be able to re-convene and present the findings of these discussions. This should help us pave the way forward in determining the right aircraft for our club, while supporting the objectives of those club members who contribute the most to the sustenance of the flying club.

On my second point of this posting, I’d like to address my goals related to aviation in the year 2018:

Pass my Instrument Rating Written Test with a 90.00% or higher as a score. I plan to schedule this examination for May, 2018.
Complete all my pre-requisite flying hours for the IR.
Take 10 friends flying and introduce them to the joys of flying.

I admit that in 2017, I dropped the ball on flying. I only flew a total of approximately 13 hours. This year, I’d like to fly at least 40 hours. That averages out to approximately four hours a month, which sounds completely attainable. I’ve got a safety pilot friend who’s interested in pairing up with me to do some flying, in order to build hours for his commercial license while I fly under the hood to obtain my XC and Simulated Instrument hours. The flying should be a lot smoother and quieter with the new Bose A20 headset I got for Christmas, which I wasn’t yet able to try out because of this severe cold weather we have been having in the Midwest. As the Stoics would say though, “this too, shall pass” and I’ll be flying again in Mid-January.

I’ve scheduled the Archer III for several hours this coming Saturday morning. For now, forecasts are looking optimistic. It’ll be my first solo winter flight, so I’ll be extra careful concerning SOPs and probably more conservative in my go/no-go decision.