Members access to the AOPA UK website

[DavidC]

I joined up with AOPA UK about a month ago as a new PPL member and received the standard new joiner paperwork package by return.

The standard letter includes a paragraph stating "If you want to gain access to the AOPA website, you will need to quote the number at the top of this letter. Access will be available from the end of the month of joining when your membership number has been registered"

There doesn't seem to be any members only content on the site at the moment, but the "update member details" page suggests this might change in the near future. So am I right in thinking the letter is just a few months ahead of its time and that this (Flyer Forum) is the main focal point for members debate?

[Timothy]

There are different opinions within AOPA as to the benefits and otherwise of member-only content.

[Mike Cross]

Good Evening David, thank you for supporting the work of AOPA by joining.

AOPA differs from other organisations in that we fight the corner of GA in general, rather than particular sectors of it. Nowadays most of the lobbying takes place in Europe and our work is chanelled through IAOPA (Europe). Our CEO, Martin Robinson is also Senior Vice President (Europe) of IAOPA, the umbrella organisation that brings together all of the worldwide AOPA's and is also represented at ICAO, the UN body that governs international civil aviation. More information on the parallel track followed by AOPA and other representative bodies can be found [url=http://www.aopa.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=73&Itemid=76here[/url].

The work we do benefits all of GA, not just our members and we rely on the public spirited actions of our members in joining to fund it. We don't have a captive membership who have to join in order to pursue their activity.

We currently have two parallel workstreams, an update of the Membership Database and ongoing work on the website. The intention is to provide membership services via the website. We now have online shopping allowing people to buy membership and book training courses, and later we'll have other services like the ability to update your details, set up payment methods and set reminders for licence and rating renewals. The logins will be needed to enable this but before we can roll it out we need to finish the database work and also update the Web software to a major new release. I'm ably assisted by Mick Elborn and James Chan.

There's a possibility that we can also use the website to provide premium members-only content but we're some way from there at the moment. The AOPA US site works like that and shows the sort of things that might be provided.

[DavidC]

Thanks for the answers. Sounds like I'm not missing out on anything here. I did join primarily to support the GA lobbying work which is extensively described in the AOPA UK magazine, but was researching what else is included.

The website has clearly come a long way in recent months and will be really good when the full program is completed. Whether a separate private forum would attract enough traffic to make it worthwhile is debatable, and as Timothy indicates, whether being private is useful or not, suggest to me that it should be a lower priority.