Making The Orgnization Respond To Its Membership... And Not Just The Whims Of A Few

Guest Editorial By Maynard McKillen

AOPA is a voluntary membership organization. What is not so widely acknowledged by members and management is that it's now under the thumb of corporate-style management and corporate bylaws.

This has reduced the effectiveness and vitality of the organization by creating a firewall between members and management: the latter should be engaging the former to discern which steps will meet members' needs. Instead, management is traipsing down on a self-serving, ideological sidetrack that has AOPA rapidly changing from a service organization to an organization selling services.

Today, AOPA membership is merely a turnstyle to a midway of commodities bearing the AOPA logo, hawked by horse traders and patent medicine barkers. As the organization brands more and more goods and services, which of its long-established advertisers will next fall prey to AOPA's corporate-tinged avarice, the new modus operandi?

When the aviation organization in whose magazine you advertise abruptly decides to sell a good or service that competes directly with the very item you advertise in it, does any AOPA member shout, "Conflict of interest!", or "Integrity-challenged decision!" Does any member of the Board demand
fairness, open debate, resign in protest?

Or does the rationale, "Business is business," prevail?

AOPA is now a business? What does that make members? The now-disenfranchised investors? A band of clerks who annoy management by insisting that they, too, still play a role in the organization? Ex-members felt the sting of this backslap, and voted with their feet.

Membership used to mean something more. It was once a respected social contract between members at large and leaders.

The grand failure of the last several years is that AOPA leadership has treated the organization as a business to be managed, and is busy stocking the shelves with commodities to hawk.

AOPA membership has fallen as members grow disenchanted with the divide between their needs and the direction and formulation of AOPA policy.

It used to be understood that AOPA membership prompted, compelled and commanded a pledge by AOPA management to serve all members. That time is years in the past now, a fond memory made seemingly more distant, given the bitterness many former members now express. And they are bitter. Their organization has been hijacked. Corporate fat cats now rule the henhouse.

Gone are the members' accessibility to leadership, gone any real, tangible accountability the leaders owe to membership, gone the transparency in action that guaranteed policy and advocacy processes were the expression of members at large, that let every member be heard and contribute. The bylaws have made this so by granting broad and ambiguous authority to Board members and Committee members. Any real American instinctively recoils at such broad power. It reminds him of a high-handed parliament and a king, all of whom were once handed their hats and invited to leave.

Some AOPA members may think nothing amiss in having their voluntary membership organization capped by a cabal of knee-jerk corporatists. That may say more about the insular and narrow strata of these AOPA members than it does about anything else.

But it remains vital to question the status quo: any healthy organization does. Among several questions ripe for the asking are: "In what ways is this organization fundamentally failing to meet member needs?" Another is: "What have we lost by capping this voluntary membership organization with unaccountable leadership?" Even more fundamentally: "Which AOPA policies will both grow the private pilot population and induce long-term sustainable economic growth in our nation?"

AOPA members, a search committee is preparing to select a new AOPA president using the same flawed process and the same insular, narrow criteria that have drastically misdirected AOPA resources and damaged its reputation as the "Big Tent" aviation advocacy organization. Demand a voice in shaping the search committee criteria, demand a "primary" vote among several candidates following a debate, and demand a final vote on the next AOPA president. The vitality, credibility and future of the organization are at stake. These are all too important to be left in the hands of a committee that was not constituted by common consent.

O'Toole wrote: "Leaders without ideas are about power."

To this can be added, "Management without ideas is about money." Seen in this light, AOPA management and policy blunders alienate members and marginalize the organization because AOPA members, the source and resource of the ideas needed to power and inspire the organization, are now ignored. Starved of this intellectual capital, AOPA management fell back on a weak, bogus ploy of creating a corporate hierarchy, hunkering down behind a Berlin Wall of bylaws to insulate their ideological quirks from member scrutiny, and commoditizing AOPA services. This is a far cry from the moral and responsible task of refining member input and ideas to craft policy and advocacy, a far cry from any expression of member wants and needs.

Again, selling services to members is in no way the equivalent of being of service to members. AOPA relevance and influence does not derive from a ledger in the black. AOPA members should demand fundamental reform in AOPA governance, so that members' ideas and input once again become the foundation of AOPA policy, governance and advocacy.

E-I-C Note: ANN reader, Photographer and AOPA member Maynard McKillen is a Private Aviation advocate. His love of flying dates to a childhood far enough back in time that he recalls watching Lockheed Constellations and Douglas DC-6s arriving and departing at Milwaukee's Mitchell Field. He is one of the camera-toting crowd at AirVenture, attending workshops, snapping pictures of warbirds and chatting with homebuilders. He also studies economics and advocates for representative government that legislates on behalf of all Americans, not merely the wealthy and powerful.

FMI: ANN Readers... What Say You? What Needs to Happen With AOPA?