CEO"s Message

Our organization, along with the world, experienced a year full of tumult and promise, successes and setbacks, with more of both certain in the coming year. How we handle the setbacks and capitalize on our successes will set the tone for our survival as an organization going forward.

Late last year we updated the membership on our growing cost versus income situation, and asked for your help in supporting our financial position. I want to thank ALL of our members for the many kind words, donations and thoughts of support you provided in response; it has meant so much to all of us! AAHS has some more knotty financial ropes to climb, but we are making inroads to paths that will, with a bit of luck and hard work, stabilize our financial picture.

2021-2022 was first time we hired professional skills for our archivist position, as well as administrative support for two offices (both Flabob and Huntington Beach). We took on new expenses, to speed up our digitization in early 2022, and decided to attend EAA Airventure 2022. These additional costs, while modest, were still larger than what our incoming revenues were projected to cover, and would not be handily covered by the Society’s investment portfolio, which lost significant value in late 2022.

All this combined will make for frugal year in 2023. We have, and will continue to cut back or defer costs that are not an operational necessity, and, look for additional ways to fund our important historical preservation efforts. We are optimistic about our research into upcoming grant proposals, and, we are exploring ways we can make our large digital image database available to the public for a small download fee.

The world of aviation, its manufacturing industry, the airlines, general aviation, homebuilt aircraft, spacecraft, and drones has changed tremendously in the last sixty years (remember the presentation from Zipline at our Annual Meeting in June, automatically delivering critical medical supplies via drone in ten different countries? Unheard of ten years ago—). AAHS needs to make some serious changes as well, to adapt to the instant-gratification, content-hungry, automated- (of course!) world we now find ourselves in.

We always strive to keep our members informed of all our plans, and, we hope that you too, make it clear to us at AAHS what you think about where AAHS should be headed. My email, if you don’t already know it is jerri.bergen@aahs-online.org. I’d like to hear what you have to say! We cant act on every suggestion we get, but without your voice we don’t know if we’re meeting your needs or not.

Im really looking forward to the good we can accomplish this year- lets do it together!

Respectfully,

Jerri Bergen
AAHS Chief Executive Officer