from a long term members view, AOPA was bloated and catered to bigger $ than us piston drivers....it lost its core focus and morphed into a professional donation marketer with its CEO making close to $2m a year and didn't want to press FAA on issues...maybe a complete reset and new charter is due. ... problem is, no matter how good AOPAs next interation is, most members will be hard to get back and most GA pilots now are trading for a career and want nothing to do with GA let alone join and pay AOPA dues. Most of the young pilots I meet think GA is scam and feel cheated paying so much for old planes and check rides and can't wait to be done with it. thus, AOPAs failure will likely have amplified negative effect for years to come in GA for most of us.
I don’t think AOPA cares about jet-a burners ether, and most who are do not look to AOPA for guidance
As far as many of the young crowd, they don’t like aviation, many getting into it so so because they think they’ll be working 5 days a month of half a mil a year the second they “make it” to 121, most do them ideally would just sit indoors their houses for their whole life.
The younger people I have trained who enjoy GA also enjoy getting their hands dirty and working on their own planes, most of these guys don’t dream of a cirrus or new 182, they enjoy the older stuff, STOL planes, go fast aerobatic experimentals and the like
And MOSAIC teaches us that is the one thing they'll never allow. Their responses to the NPRM line item comments wrt expansion of LSRM/LSRI inspection authority to EABs make this evidently clear. I saw the writing on that wall with the part 23 re-write in 2013-15, MOSAIC just re-validates what I already knew/observed 13 years ago.
I was asbolutely surprised they allowed that expansion to LSRI/LSRM in the mosaic nothingburger, I'll 100% admit that. I didn't think they had the sincerity to offer even that meager of regulatory relief that's not otherwise catered to geriatrics/boomer special interest (medical, by statistical volume).
Of course, the other problem is that the builder crowd isn't as friendly to "refugees" as they virtue-signal. Building is also not a volume-viable way of maintaining fleet support status quo going forward. Sure, there's already under-the-table relief for the 51% rule, it just needs to be made legal and see what the market can offer as a business case. If a market doesn't exist, then eff it, they can have their cuban taxi cab hobby until 121 manages to exert enough pressure to access-deny recreational piston out of the airspace people actually want to land under, especially when flight training goes MPL/sim ab initio in the next two decades and facbuilt gets fleet-support mothballed writ large.
I love flying, but at the end of the day I rather partake in something more democratizing with my time, than play some stupid ladder-pulling status symbol game of who can income-flex the longest to be the one to turn the light off behind them. You're working against a big blind spot when it comes to affordability in this hobby. And unpopular take, many of the ingroupers don't think there's a problem at all, as the hobby sheds membership. You can't blame the regulators for that.
I wish the idea that older pilots are the ones the new sport and basic are for would die already.
If anything, it’s far more critical for younger pilots who’ve been conditioned to run to a doctor or shrink for every little thing, breakup? Here’s pills, kid
Older generations just embraced the suck, went out and found the next love of their life/month
Meanwhile, DUIs are handed out like candy now. Feeling too impaired to drive? Sleeping it off in your parked car makes sense and is responsible, minus you an easier target for police quotas than actually driving.
There are far more trivial traps today that can kill a young airman’s medical than in past generations.
I tell my students to only the medical you currently need, and only after a mock medical. For many that’s BasicMed or Sport Pilot.
People with minor FAA “conditions” can still train and build hours under Sport Pilot while the clock ticks and they quietly get their medical packet ducks in a row.
