Interview - Wally Miller BFA Executive Director

As Executive Director for the BFA Wally will have ample opportunity to put in place his love and desire to promote and foster sport aviation. The day after his contract with the BFA was signed Balloon Life editor Tom Hamilton talked with Wally by phone from his home in Monument, Colorado, which sits high above the Air Force Academy in nearby Colorado Springs. Wally talked about what he sees as his mission and what BFA members and the balloon community at large can expect during his stewardship of the largest balloon club in the world. Following is part of that conversation.

Balloon Life: What did you tell the BFA board you see as your role as Executive Director.

Wally Miller: There has been intense interest by the board to make the BFA a better organization. The Balloon Federation of America represents ballooning in the face of the whole world. There are a lot of people who fly balloons that do not belong to the BFA. My presentation in Fort Myers was really the culmination of what several members of the board and I had been thinking and talking about over the last several years-to make the BFA an organization that really serves all of the balloon community.

Now is the time to take the organization in a direction that is really going to make it contribute to the overall growth of the sport. In my presentation in Fort Myers I said that we must serve all of ballooning. We have to find a way to improve our infrastructure so that we can really give the folks out there a voice for getting their concerns to the BFA and for trying to communicate with them better. It has to be more than written communication. The BFA has got to get on a person-to-person level. We have to find out what their concerns are, we have to press the concerns of members, we have to talk one-on-one.

We have between 50 and 60 balloon clubs out there. We don’t have any official ties with those balloon clubs. Those folks are at the grass roots and they know what balloonists in America are thinking, what they want, and what they need. We need to form an alliance with those balloon clubs; they can get the word up to us and tell us the things we need to be doing in ballooning. I know some of this sounds like pie in the sky, but it is exactly what I said and exactly what I believe.

You say, "What does it mean to belong to BFA? What do you get as a balloonist for belonging to BFA?" And, I am not talking pilots. I am talking crew, I’m talking observers, I’m talking everybody that has to do with ballooning in America. The BFA really does offer a lot of services that aren’t in people’s consciousness.

We can do a lot better job toward enhancing what the BFA provides to members. For instance, in the two months since the last BFA board meeting we have added a health insurance program that has attractive group rates and provided members access to the Life Styles Association, which provides reduced motel/hotel rates. The health insurance program not only provides economical rates, but also covers somebody with no exclusions while they are flying balloons. Now, I think that is a heck of a benefit. Anybody in good health qualifies. What that does is help us to bring people who are not now in ballooning into ballooning because the health insurance attracted them.

There are a lot of people flying balloons out there that do not belong to BFA. We want to give them reason to belong to BFA.

I said that we need to improve our infrastructure, we need to improve our benefits to members, we need to improve our responsiveness to what balloonists out there are thinking. What are we doing in BFA that we shouldn’t be doing? What are we not doing that we should be doing that would be of service to members? Essentially that is what I said.

I think that the board can achieve more focus, it can produce better results, it can get a little better organized. One of the things that I am doing is to help organize the proceedings of the board so they focus on issues that have really been thought about by our committees and really have good solutions for problems. All the major activities that we have in ballooning should have a committee structure. Those committees will really study the issues and produce recommendations.

BL: The BFA has many programs, perhaps too many programs for the human resources that have been available in a volunteer organization. How does the organization accomplish all of those missions?

WM: First of all you need to find out what the members are thinking, what they think is valuable and what they don’t think is valuable. Build the area that provides value to members, where they see value. The days of having one person on a committee in a valuable area we have to do away with.

Look at membership. I think that there should be a subcommittee doing nothing but spending its time worrying about how it’s going to enhance the value of membership. There should be another subcommittee under membership whose purpose in life is to figure out how we can get new members, grow the organization. They are the ones that work on improving communications within the organization. Find out what members want.

I agree with you, there are some things that we should stop doing and others that we should emphasize. My job, in working with the board, is to decide the things that we should do-then do them well.

If people know what we want to do and we ask people to help I think that we can have more than one person committees. If they realize what they are doing is valuable, that it really does contribute to the organization and they will work hard to make good solid growth. We need to decide what the important things are, bring those to the attention of the board, beef up those committees because they are valuable and they provide something to people. Get our act together and go down the road.

We want to look at how the regional directors can better serve and communicate with their constituents.

Balloon clubs are really the bedrock of ballooning. That is where people go out on a Sunday morning and fly balloons. That’s the way aviation itself got started. We need in the BFA to determine how we can help balloon clubs grow.

When you look at the United States there are 20 of the 50 states that do not have balloon clubs in them. We want to help balloon clubs grow.

BL: Let me address that with a statement and a question. If you go back to the early eighties, balloon clubs that set up an information booth at a balloon rally would see their club grow immediately after the event.

The window of opportunity today is when people come to a balloon event. They have expressed some level of interest. The problem is no one is providing information about ballooning, local club activity, or capturing names and addresses of those who would like to know more. Perhaps only a few thousand out of the millions that attend events all over the country might have an interest in learning more about ballooning.

Today no one in ballooning seems interested in going to a balloon event, not flying but rather setting up a booth and providing that service. How can the BFA be of assistance?

WM: We are going to do that. We looked at membership statistics month by month for the last five years. There is a tremendous spike in membership every October. The reason is we have a booth at Albuquerque. We sit and talk to people from all over the country. The average number of people that join BFA every October, if I remember my stats correctly, is two or three times the average of people who join in every other month.

If we can build the infrastructure, I can’t emphasize that too highly, so that we have a couple of people in every state, in every balloon club so there is not a balloon rally that goes where we do not have a booth. They sit there, hand out stuff and talk to people. Then we contact those people later on and tell them the member benefits that really can accrue to them if they belong to Balloon Federation of America. Try to get them into the clubs, try to get them interested in ballooning. When we capture those names we need to feed them out to the balloon clubs so that the balloon clubs can follow up with these folks and have them come out to the barbecue and get them flying. Its just kind of a back to basics.

I really believe that is doable. But, you have to get one-to-one with people. You simply can’t attract them with a bunch of flyers.

BL: Who is going to go to the balloon events and sit there and do this?

WM: All types of people. The folks who are on the board, every one of the regional and at-large directors right now are going to safety seminars and balloon club meetings.

Nancy Griffin, as you know is our membership chairman, and we were going over the membership numbers this morning. We can tell you how many members there are in every state and how many people who have balloon licenses are not BFA members.

The people who are going to go out to the rallies are the people that we are going to bring into the infrastructure. The director in the Northeast cannot communicate with the nine-hundred people in his region. He needs a helpers in every state. That offers people a chance to participate in the process. We need to make BFA a more participatory organization.

Something else we want to do is get out the word on how to do this. I found some information from my association with the Soaring Society of America that I want to send to balloon clubs. There is an outstanding program started by the Soaring Society about how to get members into the club. They have a lot of good ideas that I hope we can use in ballooning and produce for balloon clubs. We’re not saying, here’s how to do it, but saying here are some suggestions that have been successful.

If we want people, i.e. balloon clubs, then we have to help them in every way that we can. There ought to be two or three BFA reps in every state.

To answer your question, we need to get BFA focused on this. I think we can do this. There are a lot of people who will do things if you just ask them to help out and provide them with the information that they need. I don’t think we do enough asking in BFA.

BL: Much of the friction in the past both at the board level and people not wanting to belong to BFA has centered around the Competition Division or the sport flyer versus the serious competitive pilot. Some of this stems from the fact the competition folks have been very active and have contributed lots of energy in developing their area of interest. Others then perceive that BFA is an organization whose interest is in serious competition. How do you overcome this friction?

WM: I know exactly what you mean. When I came on to the board a few years ago there was a very decided rift. When you look at the Competition Division, and I went to their board meeting right after ours, I told them that when I came on the board that we were almost at odds. At the board level now that conflict is almost non-existent.

I don’t see that CD/non CD is an issue with us on the board. There are some things that the sport side of the house can improve on. There are some things that the competition side can improve on. One of the things that we need to realize is that you need both legs of the stool in order to stand up.

I am not saying that competitive ballooning is an advanced form of the art of ballooning. It is just a different form. Competitors are really focused. They have a very specific objective. Those of us who fly for the sheer wonder and enjoyment of flying, we need to get our act organized just much as the competitors have their act organized.

BL: Mike Wallace, referring to the BFA, once said that he has never seen so many people trying to go down the road all pulling in different directions. Do you agree with that assessment?

WM: Mike is a intelligent and perceptive guy. Mike is also leading the charge for this new effort. I don’t see a whole bunch of dissension, we all want to improve the infrastructure, we all want to improve member benefits, we want ballooning to grow.

What service does the Balloon Federation of America provide to commercial ride operators for instance? We want to do that. There have been several people who have mentioned that there should be a balloon club division. I think that is probably a pretty good idea. That has a tremendous amount of merit.

Two of us are always smarter than any one of us. If we can mutually help one another, if we can communicate better, then we can have an infrastructure of people to accomplish the goals we have established. We are not a person-to- person organization but we need to become one.

BL: All of this requires a certain staffing level. There is a tremendous amount of administrative work that has to be done. How do you accomplish that staffing?

WM: I would say that the prize is worth the race. Whether we will achieve what we need to achieve or not will depend on whether we can develop the infrastructure. We have to find ways to appeal to people to help us out. If we can do that the organization will be better and serve its members more. If the organization grows what that does is to bring in more membership dollars to turn around and hire that staff.

I looked at one of the NAA’s Air Sports Divisions here in town with me and they have a staff of ten people. I know another air sports organization that has 13 people. I think that the way you build staff is to build membership. You build your membership by being responsive to your members and providing value to them. We need people to tell us what we need to be doing to add value.

BL: If the members come to you and say what we want is lower minimum safe altitudes and the FAA off our backs for careless and reckless selection of landing sites because we think that it was appropriate, how do you proceed?

WM: Well, let me tell you one of the things that we are doing right now. Part 91 has finished with its initial deliberation procedure. Right now there are two petitions that are of a real interest to ballooning. One is for minimum safe altitudes and the other is for some change to the night lighting requirements (see Preflight page 10). We are following these two very closely and we are seeing how we are going to formulate the attack. But, right now as a result of the review process that we participated in there is a motion, and it will appear in the NPRM I am told, to exempt balloons during takeoff and landing and other operations where safety is not compromised. That is something that balloonists want and something that we are going to fight for.

We have been very active in the formulation of Part 91. We are going to stay on it and really push for those provisions. The BFA has been participating in the Part 91 review through the ARAC process (aviation organizations are invited to participate on committees to make recommendations to the FAA). We had a representative on the ARAC committee.

We need to get out to safety seminars and club meetings and we need to tell people what is going on. I am in the process of coming up with a sheet that I can provide directors of what is going on so they can then communicate that to the members and the balloon community at large.

BL: At this point I take it that you are mostly in the information gathering stage?

WM: We have some fairly definite ideas, but we need to improve the way the board operates. We all agree on that. We know that we need to communicate better. We know that balloon clubs are critical. We have a mailing out to determine how many people don’t have any association with BFA and how many people fly balloons. I think that when we come to our board meeting the last weekend in April in Colorado Springs, a whole bunch of the data gathering will be over. It is then time for us to move out and try to enhance benefits.

BL: Are there any other goals and objects that you have established at this point in time?

WM: At the next board meeting we are going to make some decisions and set the direction, to improve the strength of the BFA and better serve members and ballooning at large. We don’t need to serve just BFA members, we need to serve ballooning. The way we do that is to build a strong organization.

People are free to make suggestions for improvement. Send them in.

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