The problem for AOPA is the cluelessness of the community of pilots in Europe who expect tiny voluntary organisations to be like big commercial enterprises, vigorously competing for their membership.
That is true, as far as it goes.
AOPA UK is a tiny voluntary organisation because it has a history of being unable or unwilling to work with any of the other representative organisations in the UK. That my be apocryphal, but is a comment I hear all to frequently that would lead me to suspect their is more than some truth there.
Unfortunately they also seem to have perfected the art of sitting on the fence on a raft of important issues and when they finally come off the fence they also manage to totally misrepresent matters. The IMCr is close to my heart as but one example. AOPA couldnt make up their mind whether to support the IMCr or not and when they finally felt they should support the IMCr they managed to issue a number of press releases that were real howlers. Large or small their is no excuse for some of the technical inaccuracies they have put their name to, nor to their vindicative campaign regarding the 61.75 and certain individuals.
They claim to be a tiny organisation run by volunters but their proliferate spending on offices in London does not support their claim.
Finally, Martin is past his sell by date. I have heard far too often that he has simply been in the post too long - the organisation badly needs fresh blood and fresh ideas and it might be at the forefront of representing UK GA again, although I fear Martin has already done too much damage and their are wounds that cannot be readily healed. That is what I have been told anyway.
From personal experience I have had some dealings with Martin over the IMCr which unfortunately supported earlier apocryphies, so I feel there is more to this than the GA population being particularly clueless. More to the point while this is an often made assertion my experience is other. Most pilots I meet are reasonably wealthy and reasonably savy (not that the two necessarily go together). I dont think on the whole they have the wool pulled over their eyes that easily and I think there is a reason most in the UK dont join AOPA and most in the US do.
When you drill down into the numbers I think AOAP UK reprsents something around 5% of the total UK GA population (and even that may be generous given the corporate membership). That in itself speaks volumes and if nothing else does leave them as a tiny organisation which attempts to hide behind AOPA US with the claims they make on their UK website. They should face reality and do something about it!
421C - why do I get the impression we are going to disagree.
