Broadening our perspective

"The Canadian Owners and Pilots Association promotes and protects personal aviation as a valued, integral and sustainable part of the Canadian community."

- COPA’s new mission statement

Your Board of Directors held its fall meeting on Oct. 27 and 28 in Ottawa. Our fall meetings are always a bit special because they coincide with COPA’s annual VIP reception for dignitaries from Transport Canada, Nav Canada and the many other organizations and associations COPA works with regularly in Ottawa.

This year we did something a little different. The reception was held at the Vintage Wings of Canada hangar at the Gatineau Airport.

Vintage Wings of Canada is a privately owned foundation devoted to preserving and operating the largest collection of privately owned, airworthy vintage aircraft in Canada. Founded by Michael Potter the collection currently consists of nine airworthy vintage aircraft including a Hurricane, Spitfire, P51, Beaver and more (see the full collection at www.vintagewings.ca).

The newly constructed 1930’s style hangar filled with beautiful vintage aircraft provided an exciting venue for our reception. A gathering we shall not soon forget.

Our board meeting was exciting too. Exactly one year after we started our strategic planning process an important milestone was reached. The initial plan is now complete and the board passed a resolution putting into effect COPA’s new mission statement and seven strategic objectives. These seven strategic objectives in turn spawned 29 strategies.

Our new mission statement both narrows our focus and at the same time broadens our perspective. A focus on “Personal Aviation” reflects the type of flying most of our members are engaged in. We define “Personal Aviation” as that sector of General Aviation where aircraft are flown for personal transportation and recreation, and where aircraft operation does not require a commercial or higher pilot license. Our job is to promote and protect personal aviation in Canada.

This by itself is not enough. We must look beyond ourselves and promote the value, to all Canadians, of Personal Aviation as a mode of transportation. Whether this “personal transportation” is for business travel, personal travel, emergency travel, or recreation sustainability requires that Canadians recognize the value of personal aviation to our society. Hence the broadening our perspective.

I’ll leave a discussion of our strategic objectives and strategies for future issues of COPA Flight. At this time the board has identified a couple of key actions that must be undertaken before we can move forward with any new plans.

One is the need to get our staff back up to full strength. Everyone knows the cost of doing business does not stand still. As costs have increased over the past few years our President and CEO has fine tuned the operation to give our members maximum value for their dues. However, the operation is now fully taxed and no new initiatives can be undertaken without bringing our staff level up from the current eight, to 10 people.

Along with this comes the need to upgrade our current office space which is now fully utilized.

A second item that needs to be addressed immediately is a new member survey. This one must be more comprehensive than the last one we did in 2002 so that we can clearly identify the priorities of our members.

Rather than do it in-house with our limited resources we have chosen to engage a professional survey firm to design and conduct the survey. This will be undertaken in the next couple of months. Please watch for this and respond when you see it. Your input is vital to help COPA provide appropriate member services and the data you provide is vital to help COPA protect your interests.

It is all well and good to plan our strategies and tactics for moving ahead but in conjunction we must prioritize and determine how to fund new initiatives. The board is now dealing with this balancing act.

While we have sufficient reserves to get started on items like those mentioned above, we must insure that we have the revenue coming in to cover any new on-going activities. This will be prime discussion material at our future board meetings.

Meanwhile, keep your prop spinning.