Happy New Year to all of you in Calgary Recreational and Ultralight Flying Club, I hope that you enjoyed Christmas and New Year on both family and flying front. I have to admit that I had no complaints in this winter on flying front. In the last three weeks, I had about 10 hours of flying time and the plan is to keep the flying time at minimum 10 hours per month until obtaining my private pilot’s license (PPL).

Despite of all our efforts to expand the size of our club, we are still lagging on the effort to bring in new members. In addition, we see that we are slipping in maintaining the club membership and member engagement. I would like to reinforce that we are open to listening and working on new ideas to increase the current member engagement to sustain the size of the club if not increase it.

The trend in our club is not different than the trend in the general aviation. General aviation is losing its popularity, and someone should do something to reverse the trend. We are open to your ideas so if you have any, please do not hesitate to contact me on bashar.hussien@shaw.ca.

COPA recently announced that the 2015 Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held in Winnipeg, Manitoba on June 20th. COPA Flight 35 located at the Lyncrest Airport (CLJ5) was awarded the honour to host this year’s AGM. Pilots will have the opportunity to land at Lyncrest or at St. Andrews (CYVA). I am taking the opportunity of having the AGM in the center of Canada and will be planning to fly in a day before the AGM date and stay there for at least two nights. If you are interested in attending, you can contact me (above mentioned e-mail) so we can plan to fly in together as a group.

The year of 2014 was very remarkable for me on flying front. I obtained my ultralight pilot permit in the month of May and achieved a big step in obtaining my PPL by soloing in Cessna C-172 on the day of December 30th. My goal is to obtain the PPL in the first quarter of 2015 to be able to fly to Oshkosh this year in my Zenith CH-750 STOL in the month of July. Likewise, if you are planning flying to Oshkosh this year, please talk to me so we can gather other interested folks and fly in with a few airplanes to Wisconsin this summer.