EAA Canadian Council Plans AirVenture 2020

November 2019 - Your EAA Canadian Council represents the interests of all Canadian EAA members, especially regarding our activities at AirVenture Oshkosh. We recently met in Toronto to review AirVenture 2019 and lay plans for next year's event.

Your Canadian Council takes a break for a photo. Left to right are Ian Brown, Patrick Gilligan, Jack Neima, Jeff Seaborn, Kyle Ludwick (EAA headquarters), Ed Lubitz, and Lloyd Richards.

We reviewed action items from AirVenture 2019. For example, the Canada Tent needs to be replaced; it is leaking and showing significant signs of wear. The Canada Breakfast has outgrown our location near the Nature Center; we are working with EAA headquarters to find a larger location, perhaps closer to the show grounds.

We agreed that it was extremely important for EAA and COPA to work on items of common interest. There was a fairly wide-ranging discussion on projects, including collaboration on legal issues, FAA, Transport Canada, pilot privileges, and border crossing.

Your council meeting in full swing.

Several methods were discussed for increasing chapter membership and for the creation of new chapters. Your Canadian Council had a goal of promoting membership growth by 2 percent, and we actually achieved 5 percent growth since January 1. We must be doing something right, but it would be great if some of those new members wrote to us.

Several Bits and Pieces readers have been unwittingly unsubscribed. Please bear with us as we try to fix this. The short-term fix would be to have those readers resubscribe, but the longer-term solution is to understand why this happened, and that's what we're working on.

We discussed involving the individual Canadian chapters more in the Canada Breakfast, typically held the Wednesday of AirVenture. We have a commitment to providing many more tickets, courtesy of Global Insurance, if we can find a larger venue.

Kyle Ludwick mentioned that the topics for AirVenture next year should be an opportunity for emphasis by our Canadian Council. Those celebrations include the 75th anniversary of World War II; the Round Engine Rodeo, a celebration of radial engines; and the 50th anniversary of the formation of the International Aerobatic Club's Canadian Snowbirds.

Several of our committee members will reach out to radial engine specialists in Canada, and we may be able to schedule a presentation on a Canadian icon such as the Norseman. Other forum topics specific to Canadian attendees might be the impact of ADS-B Out and 406 ELTs. You may wish to submit suggestions for topics by sending us a message through the Contact Us button at the top of this newsletter.

Two items we always start looking for around this time of year are aircraft to display and nominees for the Lifetime Achievement Award always given out at our breakfast. Please contact us if you have suggestions.

We loved having Mikey and Joe McBryan for our breakfast this year and look forward to booking someone or some group to speak at next year's event. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could get the Snowbirds? Lloyd Richards will work on putting forward some other suggestions.

We reviewed data showing EAA membership demographics in Canada. It's clear that many members do not have the opportunity to attend chapter meetings, and we discussed ways of approaching the membership where there are clear clusters of EAA members without a chapter.

The B-17, B-25, and Tri-Motor tours have been a big success in the past. Apparently, the tour into Canada would be difficult but not impossible.

SportAir Workshops promotion proved to have disappointing results. We need to understand why attendance is poor, since these workshops have been very successful in the past. Perhaps MD-RA could provide information to those who had submitted a letter of intent.

We discussed topics for Canadian-specific webinars, including an ADS-B webinar on Canadians flying into the United States, as well as antenna diversity for ADS-B in Canada.

Bits and Pieces articles are always needed, and our council members were encouraged to send in items, however small, ideally with pictures and a few paragraphs of text. The most popular articles appear to be those referring to actual homebuilt aircraft, instrumentation, maintenance, and construction. Chapter news and reviews are also popular.

We had a fairly extensive discussion about succession planning. You can imagine the problems we would have if we had no replacement for the chairman, or perhaps even your newsletter editor!

If you were at AirVenture Oshkosh this year, you could not miss the United Airlines 787 Dreamliner. Here is an article on United's website about the all-female flight.

Your EAA Canadian Council will continue working for you through the darker days, trying to take care of the many factors that make AirVenture such a success. Our typical attendance is about 20 percent of the 6,500 Canadian members. We look forward to seeing you in the same location, near the base of the control tower — just look for the Canadian flags flying outside the tent!