President's Blog

COPA members do the coolest things!

2009-01-27T16:26:00Z

Anyone who has joined COPA knows that the strength of the organization comes from the many diverse talents of the members. In particular, a number of our members have put their software talents to use and created some of the most amazing free (at least to other members) tools that enrichen our aviation habit. Here are a few examples:

One of the most venerable (and venerated) tools is Mike Glazer's PC-based Emax program. Available for download from his website it has been under continuous development since 2003. As of this posting the current version is 21.3. When it was introduced, it revolutionized the monitoring and analysis of engine operations. It has been a crucial educational tool for countless owners, and supports all three engine data capture systems found on factory Cirrus: Arnav, Avidyne, and Garmin Perspective. (I should mention that there also is a commercial analysis package, EGView by EGTrends that supports other capture systems such as GEM, Xerion, EI, and Chelton and is used by Cirrus and many of their service centers).

I will caution anyone planning to use Mike's EMax to read the license agreement carefully!

Mike's EMax has even spawned an ecosystem of related tools. Joe Areeda's EMax Batch Processing Program facilitates the handling of large number of engine data log files, and can automatically invoke Mike's EMax for detailed analysis.

One of the newest tools to appear is Marcus Adolfsson's 'Web 2.0' spin on engine analysis with his CirrusReports.com website. A free online service, it lets you easily upload all your engine files, review them in a powerful Google Maps-linked display, and choose to share them with others on the web. Marcus's program appeared to us suddenly as a complete tour-de-force. Already he has 10's of thousands of hours of engine data online from our members.

Moving beyond engine management, Bob Urshel gave us CirrusPerformance, an extremely elegant weight&balance and performance analysis tool that even incorporates current wind conditions to predict takeoff and landing performance. Bob has produced both Mac and PC versions (and a few of us are hoping for an iPhone version someday!)

Of course, performance isn't the only preflight concern. NavMonster.com organizes maps, decoded weather, charts, FBO's, and even food&lodging information around your designated route. Its most recent update includes decoding of the infamously unreadable Area Forecast. And it does have iPhone and mobile versions!

All of these tools have grown organically with our organization. One of the most exciting things has been to watch the feedback in the member forums go back to the authors, who then improve and implement the ideas. The result has been very robust and complete functionality. And, the member forums also provide fantastic front-line support for new users of the programs, and act as a panel of experts for findings that arise.

I am sure I have missed some other fine examples of tools created by our members. Please use the comments below to add any others. And let me finally express the deepest gratitude of our membership for the selfless efforts that have produced these marvelous systems.

Safety Behaviors (survey results part 2)

2008-10-26T04:28:00Z

(For part one of this review of the 2008 COPA membership survey look here.)

SAFETY BEHAVIORS

We made some investigation of safety issues and behaviors.

42% have attended one or more CPPP’s, with a well-intentioned further 39% ‘planning’ to. Similarly, 28% have attended a CDM and 35% ‘plan’ to. Which reminds me of a tale: 5 frogs are sitting on log. 4 decide to jump off. How many frogs are left on the log? 5 of course. They only ‘decided’ to jump off. They never actually did it. Just do it, folks - bookings are open!

On risk behaviors, we saw about 40% have never picked up ice in an non-FIKI airplane (like our Cirrus). Good for them, that shows good judgement! That means 60% have, but only 6% report a ‘major scare’ involving ice. Folks, if you pick up ice in our planes, be scared. Get out.

We queried people about the average ‘fence crossing speed’ on landing. 23% reported a number above 80kts. That suggests a major training issue in the fleet. Unless you regularly land at gross weight with winds gusting down the runway, there is no reason to be coming over the fence above 80kts. We have seen a number of major incidents this year around landing loss of control, and landing too fast is the major suspect. One key message on landing; don’t let your wheels touch the runway until the ‘ready-to-land’ horn (aka stall horn) is sounding. If that isn’t your regular practice, get some dual and nail it.

Around 15% of members will not fly in IMC, and the same percentage won’t fly at night. Fully 54% of members will not fly night IMC, and that is a good thing; night IMC flight is 3 times riskier than either alone. If you do fly night IMC, consider carefully your personal currency minimums.

The COPA fleet is moving past adolescence. Only about 25% of the planes have over 1000 hours, but 69% have between 500 and 1000. As the planes move out of warranty we are seeing increasing interest from members in managing maintenance costs, and that will be an area for COPA to increase emphasis in the future.

COPA members have shpilkis (Yiddish for ‘ants in the pants’). Only 25% report they have no interest in upgrading to newer planes. 40% report the apple-of-their-eye would be another piston single, a similar percentage say a turboprop single, and 35% the Vision SJ50. In a tribute to customer satisfaction, 56% would absolutely buy another Cirrus, 48% might look around first, and only 1% say absolutely not. Put another way, 75% say their satisfaction with Cirrus either ‘couldn’t be better’ or ‘exceeded expectations.

We asked about a number of possible new features on our existing planes. As you might expect, responses were all over the board, but known ice capability and more useful load stood above the rest. We dug deeper into the satisfaction factors, and way the highest satisfaction with the initial delivery and purchase experience. A step lower but still good were warranty services, reliability, parts availability, and interior/exterior finish. Moving below average we say relationships with Cirrus partners such as TCM and Avidyne, and by far the lowest score came for parts pricing. At Migration Cirrus announced they were publishing their parts pricing on “My Cirrus” on their website, and a program to address any parts prices that were out of line.

Finally, how is COPA doing. Only 23% reported not using the website at all, with 66% using it 1-5 hours a week. Of the active members, 38% reported they only read what’s there and don’t post at all, and on the other end of the spectrum 4% reported they were ‘active’ posters. 48% reported they ‘reply to posts and occasionally start new threads’. In terms of physical participation 76% have never attended a regional fly-in, and a similar percentage have never attended a Migration (though 50% ‘plan to’; see frogs above!). Overall 65% said COPA exceed or better expectations, not quite as good as Cirrus did.

Well, that’s a whole lot of numbers. What do we do with this? The survey has given the COPA Board a good insight into what is happening in our community and the emerging needs. With our growth and the growth of the Cirrus product line diversity is the necessary name of the game. We now have multiple avionics platforms (Avidyne, Garmin, L3?), airframes (SR2x, SRS, SJ) and new and used aircraft. Our community is not just a group of new airplane buyers but has many new owners of used aircraft looking at the care&feeding of older planes. One of the big initiatives of 2008 has been the development of the new website, which has tools to allow us to create more topical content to address many of these subcommunities while still providing a cohesive environment for those who enjoy the full sweep of the association. We look forward to building on this to keep COPA moving forward.

COPA - Who are we?

2008-09-26T04:38:00Z

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.

COPA 2.0 day 1 - what a day!

2008-08-23T23:53:00Z

Well, we are approaching the end of the first day of COPA 2.0. We started with a soft-launch on Thursday, when I started trying to pursuade some of our more active posters to come over and take a look. We made the cutover at 10:30pm Friday night. At every step of course in a project like this you hit unexpected snags. I gave Couto Solutions the word to change the web address and told the Board it was happening. Then they called me back to tell me that our old ISP would not allow us to switch to a new site, so we had to scramble for a way to make it work. The result was we 'redirected' the traffic, which is why you see the URL's of our site once you are in say 'live.cirruspilots.org' rather than 'www.cirruspilots.org'. Well, we'll get that fixed soon enough.

Rising this morning at 7am to see what the damages were, we found the site running well and only a couple of requests for passwords. That was my big worry, whether we were clear enough on how to get a new password and if it would work. That came through with flying colors, so we decided to turn the heat up. Tim Gieseler, master of mailing lists (in addition to his master of content and other general masteries) took the entire 2900 member COPA mailing list and sent out a blast announcing the new site around midday. That led to a huge surge of people hitting the site. At the peak I saw over 60 members on simultaneously, around double what the old site was typically handling, and things seem to be holding up fine.

The new membership system seems to be working; I've had a few trouble reports but haven't been able to track down any specifics, but in the meantime we have had a number of renewals go through, and we have had several new members join, including a CFI at the new non-owner rate and a member joining with a 2 year membership.

So, we are continuing to watch things, uncrossing a few fingers but keeping some in reserve, and probably going to catch a little time off too. Enjoy the new site!

Welcome to COPA 2.0

2008-08-22T04:15:00Z

Well, it is nearly 7 years to the day since COPA was announced to membership of SR20.org, and with it came an amazing new website, the creation of the brilliant and dedicated Steve Lin. Well, it has taken a team laboring for a year to find a successor to Steve's creation, and here it is. It is again the result of much volunteer work, including vital assistance from Steve, but also many, many hours from Bob (Turbo) Anderson, Tim Gieseler, Alan Grose, Blaine Iler, Sanjay Saigal, and others. We also employed the assistance of Couto Solutions, referred to us by COPA member Tom Spaulding.

The result is COPA 2.0, a new modern platform that should carry COPA for the next 7 years. It is remarkable to look back on that announcement and realize there were only 200 Cirrus airplanes in owners hands. Today there are nearly 20 times that number. With that growth have come many new needs to support our nearly 3000 strong membership. I hope you will enjoy exploring COPA 2.0.

The system we have deployed today is actually a very minimalist implementation; our focus has been on bringing all our members, systems, posts and messages over with the best fidelity possible. We will from this point start to explore the new capabilities our new platform offers. But as a general overview, here are some of the high points of what we have undertaken:

Stable modern software platform to support future growth. Old system was teetering on technological brink of disaster.
Improved editor for creating posts with formatting, easily imbedded images, etc.
Vastly improved search capability and display of results
Support for fine-grained topic forums while preserving ability to see big picture of site traffic
Integrated Event Calendar with automatic updating from registration system
Blogs to organize and highlight contributions from distinctive points of view
Improved accessibility and future integration of COPApedia
Improved access to COPA-provide information archives
Media libraries for photos, documents, videos
Tools to facilitate member-based management of site content
RSS feeds can create custom stream of posts to personalized readers
Email feeds to automatically push desired forum posts
Community tools to easily filter out content that matches your interests.
Personalize your own Profile pages to show your interests, favorites, etc.
'Friends' capability to connect members of common interests
Greatly improved flexibility and adaptability of site as content is developed
Support for multiple subscription options for members, CFI's, vendors, etc.
Reduced support requirements for lost passwords, lost usernames, cookie problems, etc.
Support for moderation tools to implement COPA posting guidelines

There is much more to be said about each of these topics. We have created two special forums to ease the transition. One is the "Need Help Logging In" forum, which if you have gotten this far you won't be needing again. The other is the "New Website Help & Discussion" forum. As you have questions that is the place to go, and if you've figured out something, that is the place to share it! So again, welcome to COPA 2.0, and happy exploring.