Are You Missing Out?

September 2016 - It just occurred to me that, although official summer just started a few weeks ago, the end of the flying season for many is rapidly approaching.

Get those fly-ins in, get those flys-in in, whatever, you know what I mean. Don’t miss out. I had the great pleasure of attending one this weekend. There were three in my area on the same day. I chose the one that was not only closest, but it was based at my friend Serge Desilet’s grass strip. He was also my camping buddy at AirVenture. Here is a nice shot of the pilots who had flown in. Serge is in front of the vertical stabilizer of my RV-9A, and I’m to his left in the white T-shirt.

 

Yamachiche corn roast fly-in pilots

It will soon be fall colours time, so it’s a good time to be planning where you’ll be flying. There are many fall colours fly-ins across the country, and I hope you all find the time to enjoy the Canadian splendour that presages the bleak whiteness that is an altogether different kind of splendour.

 

Fall colours in the Laurentians

Our newsletter goes out to close to 7,000 readers, many of whom actually read it! We lost 69 readers last month due to their e-mails being returned or “bounced.” This was an unusually high number. If you know of people who changed their e-mail address and forgot to update it with the EAA, especially with their subscribership to Bits and Pieces, perhaps you could pass this month’s issue along, with a reminder to update their Bits and Pieces subscription e-mail address. Don’t hesitate to forward this to others you think might like to read it. They can subscribe for themselves, whether they are EAA members or not, by following this link. Any chapter officers reading this might be interested in applying this strategy at a local level, which I heard while attending a chapters boot camp in Brockport, New York, recently. It’s an excellent idea to encourage wide circulation of your chapter newsletter. You may feel that it should be a benefit of chapter membership and, therefore, proprietary to the membership, but it’s a lot more important as a promotional tool to the area you serve. Send copies to local pilots whether they’re members of your chapter or not. If your chapter is not growing, it’s shrinking. One way to grow it is to let nonmembers know what you’re up to.

I'd like to offer a special thanks to Doug Martin this month for his excellent article on the Yukon trip and his spectacular photographs, especially the breathtaking one of the glacier.

Not wishing to sound like a broken record, broken record, broken record … but I’d like to invite you to submit an article or two for the reading pleasure of your fellow subscribers. There is a certain pride in being able to count the number of articles your editor has written single-handedly (over 200), but really, the quality of our newsletter would be so much better if we had more contributors.

It would take no more time to write a few paragraphs in an e-mail, and attach a couple of photos, than it does to read Bits and Pieces each month. Please pick up a pen right now, go and find your to-do list, and write “I promise that I’ll write something for Bits and Pieces by September 24 and e-mail it to BitsandPieces@eaa.org.” You don't need to be an author! I love correcting spelling and grammar mistakes, and adding the odd comment, otherwise my British grammar school upbringing was a waste of time. I’d love to fill our funnel with articles for future issues.

So that’s the theme for this month – don’t miss out on the glorious fall colours, or your subscription to Bits and Pieces, or on your resolve to have an article published for others to enjoy.