Informal background on what’s going on at the LAA.
The Rally for 2010
As you may have seen on the press release, the LAA Rally will be held at Sywell on 3rd, 4th and 5th September 2010. This follows the successful Revival event in September 2009 and will take the concept to the next level, continuing with the ‘back to basics’ ethos of low risk, low cost, maximum fun. We’re anticipating over 1000 aircraft for this event. We’ve planned a series of bulletins to provide information during the lead up to this prestigious event.
We’ve been working on this for months with the Sywell team and have an agreement that should provide a great event, with minimal risk. As you’re no doubt aware, risk, safety, litigation are significant considerations in this day and age and we’ve spent considerable time to balance all the requirements.
The management team on the LAA side are Ian Harrison, Nigel Ramsay, Chris Brockis and myself. Michael Bletsoe-Brown leads the Sywell team and once again Jeff Bell will lead the tower and airfield team.
Events 2
We’ve booked a double stand for Splash – now renamed ‘The Flying Show’ at NEC for the weekend of 28th and 29th November. We’ll have the LAA shop, coaching corner, membership services, and hopefully folks from engineering and the Exec to answer your questions, discuss projects, etc. Want to build your own aircraft and train in it? Come and talk to our coaches. Combined with an NPPL, it’s got to be the cheapest way to a pilot’s licence by far. We’ll also have a superb membership offer for anyone wanting join the LAA. We hope to see you there.
AGM and open forum – 13th February 2010, Turweston 11.00am
This falls under our transition arrangements and has been stretching (my) the brain. Technically, it’s the company’s AGM, since the Association will no longer exist by the 13th February 2010. There are 3 members of the exec (board) standing down, but each has offered to re-stand for another term. This is excellent news, since they are all hard working and provide stability for the board during this change to the organisational structure of our ‘association’. Of course, any member of two years duration is welcome to stand for the Exec (it’s actually a board of directors) assuming they are eligible to be a UK director and are proposed / seconded in the appropriate manner by LAA members.
Perhaps of more general interest to the members will be the open forum immediately before the AGM. This commences at 10.00am and is open to questions and topics from the floor.
EC meeting
The EC met on 30th October.
Main topics were the Rally proposal and its approval, an update on the re-structuring progress and … a P51 has just rumbled past the window. There are some great perks to this job. Anyway, where was I?
Topics covered include:
Addressing members with Permit aircraft who renew late, or try to avoid membership entirely. This is a small, but fairly persistent minority. The position is that persons actively building or operating a Permit aircraft must hold membership. We will be backdating membership to ensure continuity.
Safety initiative – John Broad and the safety team are keen to encourage members to write in with incident reports, whether or not there’s injury or damage.
Plus all the usual governance, finance, engineering, etc, etc – the committee reports.
Safety
Safety is becoming a political hot potato, with EASA management board recently announcing a new safety initiative and last week at the GA Consultative Committee meeting at Gatwick (at CAA offices), a new initiative for safety data reporting was announced by the CAA. Clearly safety and its improvement is important to us all. However, we desperately need acceptable standards for what constitutes ‘safe enough’, otherwise the pressure will constantly be on to spend, or restrict more. Ultimately, one could see the grounding of the last aircraft as the only step available to make aviation safer. We need to start the debate about where acceptable standards are, much like is happening in the NHS and elsewhere.
Expect more on this later.
Insurance
We met our insurance underwriters recently and are currently reviewing the annual policies with our brokers. Insurance is a huge issue for the LAA. As you would expect, we cover engineering services – professional indemnity, permits, renewals, etc. but that cover extends to the officers and agents of the Association, ensuring our inspectors, staff, EC, directors, etc, etc are all covered on Association activities. Strut events, young aviator days, coaching, test flying by Francis and Andy, office, cars, stock, it goes on. It’s the largest single expenditure the Association makes and by far the most important.
With the increase in ‘no-win, no-fee’ litigation, we are actively reviewing our processes to ensure we are providing the best arrangements to protect our insurance and ensure we are all adequately protected. The vast majority of LAA voluntary work is done by members in their own time and often at their own expenses. The least we can do is ensure they are protected if something untoward happens. We’re putting better guidance into place for strut events to cover risk assessment, budget, insurance, etc.
Insurance will take up increasing amounts of our time.
Educational Trust and courses
The courses are going really well, with a terrific uptake across the range. The Trust has invested in further tooling for the ‘Working with Metal’ courses.
Claire, Penny and Sheila are the enthusiastic co-ordination team for the ET activity, including courses. Contact them at et@laa.uk.com or visit the Educational Trust website.
The income from these has enabled the ET to develop budgets and objectives for next year and details will be released in the near future.
Finance and membership
Steady as she goes. Membership figures are basically the same as last year (actually it’s 5 down from 8130 as of writing). The general view is that’s not too bad for the worst recession in most people’s memory.
We’re being very careful with the cash and only spending when there’s good reason. Hopefully, we can get the total membership back up to 2008 levels or beyond at The Flying Show next week.
The annual budget development process is underway.
GAAC wind farm meeting
As many of you have mentioned, wind farm planning applications are becoming prolific. The GAAC hosted a workshop for GA to discuss the implications and initiate some coordination within the GA community. Make no mistake, the wind business is BIG business, right up there at governmental levels. You may not think it applies to you, but established aviation activity is one of the few reasons planners and planning committees have for refusing wind farms. Therefore the industry is looking at ways to mitigate our activity as an issue.
Even away from operating bases, Transponder Mandatory Zones look like the industry’s ‘silver bullet’ for the issue of turbines and radar head returns. We may see many TMZs appearing and significantly, these don’t appear to be going through the normal airspace change process.
With so much GA activity centred around small strips, traditionally operating quietly and as invisible as possible, we’re encountering situations where wind farm developers, planners and even locals are not aware of some established aviation activity. Strip owners may find masts in their circuit, farmers asking them to leave (they can receive circa £25k per turbine per annum) and locals pleading with them to obtain planning permission. Microlights are being welcomed by middle England at last!
Have you safeguarded your operation? More information can be found here.
And finally
Unsung hero and EC member (in addition to heading the safety committee, editing the LAA Oxford Branch newsletter, being a council member of the Historic Aircraft Association, Chair of the VAC and generating the minutes for many of our meetings, including EC, of which he is a member) John Broad, seems to be my spiritual advisor, finding just the right bit of sage advice from around the web to lift the spirits of a CEO snowed under with pressing deadlines. Thanks John.
And…chairman Roger Hopkinson met recently with the Head of the French CAA (DGAC). We’re hoping to provide more updates very soon…
If you have any feedback from this informal update, please let me know:
Pete Harvey
LAA CEO
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