New Executive Director and Governance Updates

New IAC Executive Director: Tim Dahnke

Tim Dahnke, our new Executive Director, is passionate about aviation and looking forward to getting to know all of you. The IAC’s Executive Director is probably most widely known as the person that our Contest Directors interface with, but Tim is also responsible for our Airventure operations, our insurance, our trophies, the IAC National Aerobatic Championships, merchandising, marketing, and honestly pretty much everything else we do except for publications. Previously, Tim worked for the EAA in their Chapters division, and I’m really excited about what he can do for the IAC. Please help me in welcoming him by emailing him at execdir@iac.org.

IAC Tech Inspections

You may have already heard the news, but the IAC has a new tech inspection process this year: the forms once again must be signed by a member of the tech committee instead of simply any “witness”. My thanks to IAC Board member Phillip Gragg for spearheading this effort. Common sense prevailed.

IAC Governance Docs

From time to time, I like to remind the membership about how IAC governance works. I know it’s a dry subject, but it’s important!

The IAC’s governance docs can be found online at iac.org by clicking the “Govern” menu then selecting the “Policy and Procedures Manual.”

I’m very proud of the work we’ve done over the last few years to get these documents organized. When I took over as IAC President four years ago there were many documents in apparently eternal “draft” form. It was not possible in some cases to say which draft had received board approval. Also, the Executive Committee reviewed the previous several years of minutes and found many motions that had never actually been enacted. Whether our policies are good or bad are of course a matter of opinion, so I encourage you to review the documents online and contact me if you have questions or thoughts on how they can be improved.

About Board Meetings

The IAC board meets several times a year. The regular board meetings are each Spring and Fall. The IAC board also has special board meetings as the need arises. I’ve worked hard to reduce the number of special board meetings. These are disruptive to everyone’s schedule and shouldn’t be necessary except in emergencies. Previously, our policies insisted the board rubber-stamp the decisions of committee chairs. The model I’ve tried to work into our documents is to have the board notified and given a chance to veto their decisions instead. With this model, if the board simply agrees with the decision, it does not meet at all. This change in philosophy eliminated a lot of meetings where the board would convene simply to have fifteen people say “Aye”.

I also am more skeptical than my predecessors, I believe, when someone comes to me and exclaims, “We need a special meeting!” Not everything is an emergency. Passion is a feature, not a bug, but I’ve learned that decisions made in the heat of the moment tend to need revisiting later anyway. Even with emergencies, calling a board meeting too soon can sometimes be a mistake. It’s best to let emotions subside a bit and make sure we have our facts straight before calling a meeting.

The Minutes

The result of every board meeting, whether regular or special, can be found by going to the “Govern” menu and selecting “Meeting Minutes and Documents”. Occasionally, someone will ask me if the IAC board could be more transparent. This is a great question but has a boring answer because I personally couldn’t possibly remember what we did if it weren’t written in the minutes, so that is where the decisions are recorded. It’s all right there. I’ve also worked with our secretary, Sara Arnold, to make sure that our minutes are better organized than ever before. Each motion is now numbered so it can be referenced more easily, and we’ve adopted standards that make it much easier to read than it was before we took on our roles.

About Contest Policies

One of the tricky things for board members to deal with is policies which sound great in committee but are unwieldy or backwards in actual practice. Sometimes we struggle to figure out when to say “no” instead of “please try not to” and when to say “should” instead of “must”. The sanctioning process allows me a little bit of leeway to help Contest Directors so they can run contests that can’t, for various reasons, exactly follow our written policies. These are called Rules Deviations and must be sought out in advance of the contest and communicated to arriving competitors so they can properly prepare.

However, my philosophy is to allow Contest Directors some flexibility but not Contest Juries. I gather that Contest Directors need all the support we can give them to get their contest going. But! The appearance of bias is a real problem in our sport and won’t improve if we don’t all try to keep the operation of the contests standardized. So, once the contest starts, the time for creativity is over: do not “wing it,” especially if you are a judge or juror. Just go with what the rule book says. The rule book goes through tremendous scrutiny, first through member comment, then by the Rules Committee and finally by the board. It is our most refined and trustworthy policy document.

Glider Time!

That’s it from me this month! My first competition this year is the Glider National Championships in Maricopa, AZ next week as I type this. Comments? Questions? Concerns? Looking for a good chili recipe? Email me at president@iac.org.