COPA - Who are we?

Last July I opened up M6 with a keynote presentation titled “Who is COPA?”.  The basis for the answer was the member survey we conducted early this year.  We distributed 2712 surveys by email, and received a staggering 1333 responses, a 49% rate.  That alone shows the level of enthusiasm COPAins bring to our association.

COPA is around 2900 members, up from 2600 a year ago.  If we were to look at the ‘average’ COPAin, he would be a 51 year old male from the U.S. Midwest, flies a 2004 SR22 G2 which is registered in his corporation, and puts 139 hours per year on the plane.  The plane has 397 hours total.

But wait a second;  an average COPAin?  We all know that is a meaningless statistic.  What brings strength to COPA is the variety in our ranks.  The youngest member of COPA is 18, the oldest 89. 

The US is some 87% of COPA, with members rather evenly spread around the country (though it seems the weather of the Pacific Northwest keeps numbers down).  12% live outside the US, 11% don’t own a plane, and a lucky 3% own 4 or more (yes MikeM, we are talking about you).  We have at least one member with over 5000 hours IN TYPE!

OWNERSHIP HISTORY

82% of our members have owned a Cirrus, so we definitely earn the "O" in COPA.  But it is interesting to look into people's ownership history:

We asked a number of questions about peoples ownership history.  For 41% of respondents their Cirrus is their first airplane.  Clearly Cirrus is doing a great job of bringing new people to aviation and airplane ownership. It also makes clear that COPA has a continuing mission to be a resource to these new owners.

At the same time we are an experienced group; only 3% had less than 100 hours total time, 15% had less than 300 hours, and the biggest group clusters around 1000 hours.

Hours flown seems a bit of a surprise; it appears few COPAins report flying much over 200 hours a year; I would have thought the number to be a bit higher.  Of course this is time per-pilot; with shared ownership and rentals time-per-airframe could be significantly higher and when we look at safety statistics that is the number we are generally considering.

Which brings us to safety behaviors.  We did ask a number of questions to understand a bit about members' decisions in this area, and that will be the subject of my next blog.