CEO’s Message

On behalf of AAHS, I want to apologize for the extended delay in getting you the Summer AAHS Journal. Like many very small organizations, we have an extremely short ’bench,’ where losing one of our valuable contributors can have a visible, detrimental effect on meeting our objectives. And one of our most key players, Hayden Hamilton, AAHS Journal Editor, has been beset by many unanticipated challenges that have kept him from meeting publication deadlines. We’ve been adapting our workflow to transfer more publishing functions to other hands, but clearly we need to do more. To that end, for the first time, we’re outsourcing the technical layout tasks of the Journal publication and dispersing article preparation among several volunteers, instead of having them collected and reviewed by a single individual.

Hayden has performed the role of AAHS Journal Editor for over 19 years. His broad knowledge of aviation history, the AAHS image archives, technical knowledge of various publication software programs, and his passion to get a layout juuusssst right has all combined to provide AAHS readers with a superior quality reading experience, based largely upon his efforts (and of course, our AAHS contributors). We’ve grown to depend on Hayden to ’pull things together’ from a bewildering mash-up of articles, random photos, author suggestions, news headlines and donated materials, not once in a while, but every three months!

Better planning on our part would have had us working a succession plan to methodically train new individuals in key publishing tasks within our normal workflow, handing off responsibilities only when all knew their roles. But! (you knew that was coming, right?) we find that we’ll need to adapt our course midflight to meet both our schedules and your high quality expectations for upcoming Journals, without relying entirely on Hayden. Good news though, Hayden is still part of the publication team, and will ensure we don’t get too far off course while we chart our new path.

We’ll announce our new AAHS Journal Coordinator in a future Journal. In the meantime, we do appreciate your patience, and your understanding if our next few publications hits a bit of turbulence.

Jerri Bergen
AAHS CEO