By Alex Belov
Chapter President

One of my first jobs as the President of our Chapter is to outline our next goals and objectives, i.e. our Chapter Mission for this year. This will help us to focus our efforts and outline the game plan in all our activities.

I see several targets I believe we as a Chapter should aim for. First and foremost, keep up the Chapter activities. There is a thousand things we can do just to keep us all together and have fun. I would like to see us increase the number of fly-ins, practice days, get-togethers, dinners, banquets, etc. Now that I am a flying member of the club, I am planning to organize regular practice sessions for competition aerobatics. Many of us train hard but very few do it with critiquing from others. We have a number of good judges in the club that could provide good advise and help in flying our competition sequences. Who else to better tell you what they are looking for than the judges themselves? Our aerobatic box at Sullivan is a great place to train and get critiqued. You can land, discuss the flight and go up again to see how to apply any necessary changes or improvements and instantaneous feedback on your progress. This is how the "Nikolay's" of the world run their training camps, I don't see why we can't do any different. I propose regular practice sessions at Sullivan on weekends. It is within 30-45 minutes for many of us, usually quiet on weekends and a great place to train. Anybody who's interested let me know.

A suggestion was brought up to change our regular meeting place and rotate it to different airports to keep it interesting. I suggest the following: since some of us drive in, some fly in and some are based at now the regular meeting place, how about each month we make it a habit of visiting our other Chapter member's home bases. At least some of us won't have to fly each and every time and we get to see their little airport. This at the same time will create a little fly-in for the chapter. Each month we can fly to Orange, Andover, Lincoln Park, Allaire, Alexandria, Sussex, etc. I believe this will bring some fun into our meetings, versus the same routine every time. I would like to reward some of the members' dedication of getting to regular meetings either flying or driving for hours just to be there, by awarding them with our visit and making their trip that time much easier. Opinions, suggestions, complains?

Non-flying activities. How some more dinner get-togethers? Our families have become good friends as they all share the same good soul to allow us the time and money for our flying. I'm sure they all like to see each other from time to time. One member has volunteered their house for a chapter get-together, this could be a great event to make us all belong together and share some good stories, some good food and wine.

In our ever more shrinking world, as it appears lately, the idea is to keep up the camaraderie and fun, and the way to achieve that is to do more together, to help each other and to have something to look forward to constantly. I look forward to all of that.

Fly safe.

Fearless Leader…