Looking Ahead to 2024

Whether you are just getting started or someone who has flown aerobatics for many years, I look forward to enjoying an exciting 2024 contest season with you!

The first event for this year is the Estrella Classic at Arizona Soaring in Maricopa, AZ. This contest is not just a regional glider contest, it also serves as the 2024 Advanced and Unlimited Glider National Championship.

While it is still early in the year, there are already many volunteers working hard: the 2024 rule book is in a final draft form and about to be published; our judge chair is putting together the judge school materials and scheduling judge classes, our Airventure volunteer crew is planning merchandise orders, and our many contest directors and chapter leaders are undoubtedly filling out contest waiver applications and making big plans for trophies, banquets, and all the other details needed to make this season a success. Whoever you are and whatever you are doing, thank you for volunteering.

Departure of Steve Kurtzahn

Many of you have enjoyed the pleasure of working with Steve Kurtzahn, who has served the IAC as Executive Director since October of 2019. By the time you read this, Steve will have moved back into his previous role as a Lutheran pastor. I know how much everyone enjoyed working with Steve. He’s the one who handled all the contest sanctions, trophies, merchandise sales, paperwork (there is a lot of this), unknown sequences, membership issues, phone calls, invoices, insurance questions, taxes, and about a million other things. If you interacted with the IAC at the HQ level, you were surely interacting with Steve.

For fun, I looked back on all the work we have done together, and I found that we had over 2,000 email conversations! That shows you how much communication it takes to keep the IAC going. Phew! Thank you, Steve!

The IAC is obviously in need of a replacement Executive Director. If you are interested, or know someone who would be, please reach out to me at president@iac.org or contact the EAA’s Human Resources department.

The Future of Sport Aerobatics

At the Fall Board Meeting, the IAC board of directors reviewed the budget and decided to transition the content of Sport Aerobatics to a digital format. The motion made at the meeting was deliberately open-ended to give the EAA and yours truly some time to put together a plan. Therefore, we do not have a schedule for this transition put together yet, nor has anyone decided what type of digital content we will end up with. We are in the exploratory phase of this endeavor, with more questions than answers. We will be considering our options in more detail at the Spring Board Meeting.

This is a tough subject that could become controversial, so it’s important to say that the IAC board is always interested in hearing constructive feedback. To guide your comments: please recognize that while the IAC is not in financial peril, advertising income is just not what it once was, and you can trust that this board is aware of the value Sport Aerobatics brings to the aerobatic community.

Some of you will recall that Sport Aerobatics was published 12 times a year until recently. The switch to 6 issues a year was met with general acceptance by the membership.

Watch for a chance to give your feedback via a survey that we hope to send out soon, which will allow you to rank the importance of Sport Aerobatics against the IAC’s other offerings, but you can also always email me directly at president@iac.org.

WAAC Recap

As I reflect on 2023, I think most fondly about the time I spent coaching the US Advanced Aerobatic Team. We had a pretty good showing at the WAAC with a 3rd place overall finish.

Once when my son asked me for advice about how to get a job, I told him the trick to an interview is to solve three problems. Employers need someone who can 1) do the job, 2) is reliable, and 3) is pleasant to work with. I’m not sure where I picked that advice up from, I’m sure I didn’t come up with it myself, but it caused me to think deeply about the sort of personality traits other people need to see in us. He just got his first real post-college job as a software engineer at Boeing, and he feels that advice did the trick.

If I could describe the 2023 Team, those are the qualities I’d score them most highly on. 1) They were capable, big time: talented pilots with lots of good experience. 2) They put in the practice: they found the money, time, and mental wherewithal to make it to camp without making excuses. 3) They were a real blast to be around: good humored, caring, and curious.

Aerobatic folks are naturally competitive and can sometimes forget to work as a team. But this group was tight from the beginning to the end.

Judging is Hard

I got some great feedback on my comments last month about how judging is hard. I guess we all agree that it is. If you aren’t an aerobatic judge this is a great time of year to get involved because the IAC’s judge training schools will be in session soon. Even if you have no interest in being an active judge, you will find these schools very rewarding because they will give you a lot of background information that is useful as a competitor, registrar, or other volunteer. Also, it’s nice to set aside some time to sit in a classroom with your buddies and talk about airplanes, don’t you think?