AOPA has announced that board of trustees member Luke R. Wippler will take over as chairman and that current chairman, Jim Hauslein, will not run for reelection when his term ends in May. Longtime trustee and former Chairman Bill Trimble will also leave the board in May. Wippler takes over the post with a mandate for change, and AOPA is also announcing that there will be amendments to the bylaws that govern the election of trustees and others that need updating.
AvBrief is seeking reaction to the changes, which grew out of member opposition to the departure of former AOPA CEO Darren Pleasance in early February. Pleasance said he endorses the decision based on his experience working with Wippler during his short tenure. “I think he’ll be good for AOPA,” Pleasance said, adding in comments to this story that he’s encouraged by the move. “Luke is a good guy and a good choice for AOPA Chairman, in my view,” Pleasance wrote. “I always found him to be thoughtful and willing to engage with me and the AOPA leadership team in a very productive way. I’m encouraged by this step and look forward to seeing more details on the changes that Luke wants to drive.”
In making the announcement, outgoing Chair Hauslein said Wippler has the right mix of qualifications to lead AOPA into the future. “Luke combines strong business acumen with a deep passion for aviation and represents the next generation of AOPA leadership,” said Hauslein. “The board strongly believes he is the right leader to guide AOPA’s next chapter.”
Wippler has been on the board since 2015 and is on the Executive Committee, the Nominating Committee, and the Audit Committee and is also the chairman of the Finance and Investment Committee. He owns a Cessna 182 on amphibious floats and a Piper Super Cub. For his day job he’s executive vice president and treasurer for U.S. Bank and lives in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.
Wippler is also one of three trustees that hold proxies for regular members who cannot attend meetings to vote in person. The others are Matt Desch and, until the end of his term, Trimble. There are about 40,000 proxies held by them.
So he lives in White Bear Lake, Minnesota? I presume he will be relocating to Frederick md?
Great comment!
I don’t believe that board members have ever been expected to relocate to Fredricksburg.
Nowhere near enough, referencing the press release. Luke is the best choice of current board members for that role. But the two leaving did not get AOPA into this mess alone. Several more board members should resign.
I re-joined AOPA just to see how the new AOPA board will be doing to advance GA and to support its members. The past few months are political chaos that AOPA members don’t deserve. The out of control compensation to the CEO and other execs cannot go on forever. The board members and the execs seem like they don’t talk for us. They don’t answer questions from the membership. They behave like one big bad government entity.
Luke is a good guy and a good choice for AOPA Chairman, in my view. I always found him to be thoughtful and willing to engage with me and the AOPA leadership team in a very productive way. I’m encouraged by this step and look forward to seeing more details on the changes that Luke wants to drive…
If Luke and the board don’t reinstate you prior to July and change the bylaws to facilitate voting by ALL members, then he wasn’t the right choice. Time will tell and my membership is good until July when I will have to decide if I terminate after 47 years of continuous membership.
umm… would YOU want to go back to an organization that treated you that way? Methinks dpleasance would have many better options at this point. Every bit of reportage on this Board-driven self-inflicted wound indicates he took the pot with four deuces.
“What a nice guy.” – Madeline Kahn, “Blazing Saddles”
I would if I thought I had a new board that I could actually work with. That is what good leaders do. However, if the board remains functionally the same, then I would not go back as it would be pointless.
Having been pushed out of an organization that I helped to grow & succeed, I understand the effort it takes to be publicly positive, to remain diplomatic, and to engage on the topic day-after-day. I’m very impressed with the way you’ve publicly handled the whole situation, and looking forward to hearing about your future success!
Thank you for your thoughts. I remain hopeful for AOPA’s future and am encouraged by yesterday’s announcement.
Luke might be a good choice, but that doesn’t address our concerns. The real issue with the Board is that none of them have been elected by the membership. That has to change. We need online or mail-in ballots, we need limited terms, and we need for members to be able to nominate Board members directly. Everyone on today’s Board was chosen by the Board, so there’s no accountability to the membership.
I’ve already withdrawn my proxy. If the Board fails to make itself accountable to the members, I’ll let my membership lapse, and I won’t be alone.
Very pleased to see term limits mentioned on the list of reforms. From a career spent working with nonprofit boards, it’s the single biggest differentiator… and a huge part of the mess the AOPA Board has gotten itself into. The argument against term limits is you don’t want to lose that awesome Board member that is mega talented and has deep experience with the organization. In my experience you don’t lose them. They take a year off the Board, stay involved, and you can bring them back. Crucially, what you do lose are the ones that really need to go.
I am on two cooperative boards. I disagree with term limits as it should be up to the members to limit terms. However, this is a problem since past trustees crafted bylaws that make the trustees king and remove all authority from the members. It simply isn’t practical for a significant number of members of a national organization to travel to Frederick each year to vote. And they could not handle 100,000+ members showing up in any event.
We need bylaws that allow every member to vote online or by mail-in ballot in addition to voting in person. There would then be no need for proxy voting by trustees and that should be eliminated. And there would be no need for term limits as the members could easily replace all or part of a board that wasn’t serving their interest as is the cast with the current trustee board.
I don’t know any of the board members so I have no idea if this is a good move or just window dressing. Until I see Darren reinstated and meaningful change to the bylaws to allow ALL members to vote directly, either online as most companies do today, or via mail-in ballot like NRA and others do, I consider this simply window dressing in an attempt to appease the membership.
I was glad the announcement provided an email for feedback and I have already responded with essentially the message above. I suspect this will be ignored like my two emails to Hauslein were ignored. I have been a member since 1979, but that will likely end in July at annual renewal time unless the bylaws are changed at this year’s annual meeting to facilitate voting by ALL members and removal fo this nonsense proxy system AND reinstatement of Darren, assuming he would even want the job any longer.
Apparently AOPA does not want any group to try to “save” it. The recently inaugurated saveaopa.org website was threatened by legal action by AOPA. There is an explanatory note currently on the website https://www.saveaopa.org/
It appears as if the group is comprised of finance, capital and investment peeps appointing each other to prestigious positions within that BOT.
Okay! Lets do that.
…and if members get the vote, then it also needs to be something other than the “Soviet” model used by many boards of presenting the same number of candidates as openings.
Board “community” rewards board member acquiescence with additional board memberships…activists not so much.