Just wondering if there are any mids on here who are their unit's aviation club/society president? Not a bad billet for my senior year!
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NROTC unit aviation clubs
- Thread starter cameron172
- Start date
We have a great Aviation Club at ODU, mostly because we are sponsored by VFA-106 and our CO used to be the Commodore at Oceana. We frequently get sim time and tours with all of the platforms in the Hampton Roads area. Additionally, we are going to drive up to the Smithsonian next weekend. I'm not the president, but my friend is...
STARFlight145
Registered User
I am for my unit here at LSU/SU. Not an official billet and it's a relatively new thing, I was voluntold/volunteered. We're sponsored by VP-10 Red Lancers, they visited us with a P-3 this past fall. We've also had a T-34, T-6B, and a couple Super Hornets visit.
I'm the president of ours out here in Arizona. We took a trip last month to El Centro to see the Blue Angels. Pretty sick. Ours is just volunteer, not a billet. I'm looking at getting the go-ahead to plan a trip to Nellis AFB up in Vegas to see the Thunderbirds. But we'll see how that goes...
Hey guys I'm a mid at Notre Dame and while we don't have an aviation club, I think it'd be great to start one. I ran the idea by my LT and she was all for it, just gotta get some details set up before we pitch it to our CO. Do you guys have any info regarding the nuts and bolts of the club (ie structure, how to get it as a legit billet, how much dues are, etc etc). Any info would be great. Thanks
Irish,
You might try to get the club recognized through your campus. Thats probably the best opportunity to earn money (working at campus events, etc), and they may even be able to allocate funding for events and trips. I'd be a good place to start. Our club has the standard president, vp, treas, and sec. We also have an "ASTB officer" (basically a tutor). One of our LT is the club advisor and monitors our bank account. Ultimately, our unit is liable for the spending, trips, and events we put on. We earn our money through a carvival our school puts on every year (trash patrol). We make enough in one week to not have to charge members for dues. Good luck!
You might try to get the club recognized through your campus. Thats probably the best opportunity to earn money (working at campus events, etc), and they may even be able to allocate funding for events and trips. I'd be a good place to start. Our club has the standard president, vp, treas, and sec. We also have an "ASTB officer" (basically a tutor). One of our LT is the club advisor and monitors our bank account. Ultimately, our unit is liable for the spending, trips, and events we put on. We earn our money through a carvival our school puts on every year (trash patrol). We make enough in one week to not have to charge members for dues. Good luck!
If I remember correctly, if you registered your group with the campus and received money from them, then you had to open it up to anyone on campus and not just NROTC students. I remember not wanting to do this because I didn't want to deal with a bunch of random idiots joining our group wanting to become fighter pilots and nothing else. Didn't realize other NROTC units did this as well. Looking back, I'm not sure anything we did in Aviation Society was actually productive, maybe except for the ASTB prep.
But to actually add something useful here, and having been a previous Aviation Society leader and knowing how difficult it is to come up with content to talk about (aside from boring platform briefs), here's a couple things I think would be beneficial to prospective aviators after finally getting recently winged:
- FAR/AIM...never touched that thing until advanced, wouldn't hurt to at least get familiar with it. Runway/airport diagrams, Instrument Departure Procedures (SIDs, ODPs, VCOAs, etc.), low close-in obstacles, climb gradients, wake turbulence, navaid characteristics (VOR, TACAN, NDB, LOC, etc.), just to name a few are all 110% boring topics to talk about but certainly worth discussing and all the info is right there in the FAR/AIM.
- Tower/ATC visit...since the club is usually all about field trips, this another beneficial one to at least see what a busy tower is like and get a better perspective and understanding of what they do. When I was a student in Primary, we even visited the tower here as a part of ground school. If you can, see if you can visit approach control, wherever that may be in your city.
- 3710...I guess just know it exists. Never really understood it or knew about it until API. Not a whole lot of it changes over time, and the wx stuff about alternates are pretty good info to commit to memory. Have your aviation LT explain it, probably would be tough to completely understand for a student to read for the first time and then teach it to the entire group.
- FAA Exam prep...I remember doing a lot of ASTB prep, but not so much for the FAA. Can actually name at least a handful of studs who failed the IFS FAA exam.
- Radio comms...did a little of this when I was the president. Not saying to be a pro at it, but bringing up liveatc.net during one of our meetings was a pretty good exposure.
Few things we did with great success:
- Worked with a local flying club and got 1 hour Cessna flights for the society members. They were great, usually only charged for fuel and the aircraft and the instruction was free. Any stick time is a plus, even if it is just introductory and not logged.
- Had the members team up in pairs. Built gliders out of balsa wood and had a contest on who's flew the farthest. Did a really dumbed down flight physics brief that just scraped the surface of bernoulli's principle and the concept of lift, drag, weight, and thrust. Winning group got a day off from PT or something like that. After all the gliders were flown, did a de-brief with the group on what worked well and didn't work well with the design. Overall was a pretty decent learning experience and many of the members enjoyed being able to build something.
- Got a bunch of expired sectionals and mapped out a cross country. Good exposure to charts.
All in all, just keep everything at an exposure level. I remember one of the toughest things when being the Aviation Society president was trying to not create a mini-flight school. You'll have plenty of flight school experience down the road with professionals instructing you. I remember having a flight sim available and basically had non-experienced students teaching non-experienced students. Probably want to avoid that.
- FAR/AIM...never touched that thing until advanced, wouldn't hurt to at least get familiar with it. Runway/airport diagrams, Instrument Departure Procedures (SIDs, ODPs, VCOAs, etc.), low close-in obstacles, climb gradients, wake turbulence, navaid characteristics (VOR, TACAN, NDB, LOC, etc.), just to name a few are all 110% boring topics to talk about but certainly worth discussing and all the info is right there in the FAR/AIM.
- Tower/ATC visit...since the club is usually all about field trips, this another beneficial one to at least see what a busy tower is like and get a better perspective and understanding of what they do. When I was a student in Primary, we even visited the tower here as a part of ground school. If you can, see if you can visit approach control, wherever that may be in your city.
- 3710...I guess just know it exists. Never really understood it or knew about it until API. Not a whole lot of it changes over time, and the wx stuff about alternates are pretty good info to commit to memory. Have your aviation LT explain it, probably would be tough to completely understand for a student to read for the first time and then teach it to the entire group.
- FAA Exam prep...I remember doing a lot of ASTB prep, but not so much for the FAA. Can actually name at least a handful of studs who failed the IFS FAA exam.
- Radio comms...did a little of this when I was the president. Not saying to be a pro at it, but bringing up liveatc.net during one of our meetings was a pretty good exposure.
Few things we did with great success:
- Worked with a local flying club and got 1 hour Cessna flights for the society members. They were great, usually only charged for fuel and the aircraft and the instruction was free. Any stick time is a plus, even if it is just introductory and not logged.
- Had the members team up in pairs. Built gliders out of balsa wood and had a contest on who's flew the farthest. Did a really dumbed down flight physics brief that just scraped the surface of bernoulli's principle and the concept of lift, drag, weight, and thrust. Winning group got a day off from PT or something like that. After all the gliders were flown, did a de-brief with the group on what worked well and didn't work well with the design. Overall was a pretty decent learning experience and many of the members enjoyed being able to build something.
- Got a bunch of expired sectionals and mapped out a cross country. Good exposure to charts.
All in all, just keep everything at an exposure level. I remember one of the toughest things when being the Aviation Society president was trying to not create a mini-flight school. You'll have plenty of flight school experience down the road with professionals instructing you. I remember having a flight sim available and basically had non-experienced students teaching non-experienced students. Probably want to avoid that.
Our club president last year turned the Aviation Club at Jacksonville around and it turned out to be quite a successful year! Since Jacksonville University already has a flight program and most of the club members are "Aviation Management and Flight Ops" majors, they're earning their private and instrument FAA certs through the university, so the club mainly focuses on Naval Aviation since everyone is already learning about FAR/AIM, aeronautics, radio comms and getting flight time in Cessnas.
Things we did last year, with tons of help from our LT, were:
-Weekly swim training in base rec pool to prepare for the water survival training needed for MIDN cruise and the water portion of API. We swim in flight suits and practice the strokes/tread water to get comfortable in the flight suit.
-ASTB tutoring by MIDN who have already taken the test.
-LT sets up group appointments at NAS Jax so everyone can get their medical upchits so they can backseat flights if the opportunity arises.
-Volunteered for every airshow that is reasonably close by. We have been the aircraft marshals at the Flagler County airshow for two years now.
-Meet with IPs and SNAs who fly to Jax from NASP and talk with them and tour the T-34 or new T-6. We were able to tour the tower at Jax too.
-Took a trip to Pensacola over spring break. We met with Jacksonville grads at Pensacola, toured the classrooms and flightlines, interviewed IPs and SNAs in all parts of the training. We got some stick time in the T-6 and TH-57 sims with IPs. We also talked with a realty office to really get a feel of what it's like to live in Pensacola. One grad used to be a Blue Angel maintainer and he set up a meeting with the Blue Angels for us!
-We are also constantly bugging the squadrons at Jax and Mayport for opportunities to backseat some flights. Some of us got rides.
As for structure, we have a President, a VP, a treasurer, and then the people in charge of the individual activities. A swim class OIC, an ASTB OIC, an airshow OIC, a medical upchit OIC, a flight time OIC, and so on. They all keep the President in the loop, but mostly are completely in charge of their own activity, from planning to executing.
We are funded mostly by Battalion member dues, not by the university. The biggest expense was the three-day trip to Pensacola, but for the most part everything else is free. It's a great opportunity for MIDN to gain exposure to not just aviation, but naval aviation. I'm sure you could fluff up the pitch to the CO.
Aviation Club President an actual billet in our BN along with drill team commander and Semper Fi. I've been assigned the year-long billet for next year and plan on trying some new things and changing what didn't really work in our club.
PM me if you have questions.