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Hello and welcome, my esteemed friends, to our Club's Annual meeting for 2024, and the inauguration of our new Home Airport, Merril C. Meigs, KCGX. To those who have been flying with us since the beginning and those who have joined us along the way for one or more of our Challenges, it's great to see you all again! To those who are flying with us for the first time and who are showing us the wonders of MSFS2020, welcome! Last Fall, ViperPilot2 had the wild idea of doing a flying event for some of the older sims. A few people decided to take him up on it. That became the Bendix Challenge. Some wove elaborate fictional narratives about their sim flights. And the weirdest thing happened: After spending October flying one event, we wanted to do another, which became the Route 66 Challenge, which saw us all spending Thanksgiving together on a California beach. And what did we talk about between Thanksgiving and New Year's? Doing another Challenge, this one so big and convoluted, with three different routes, each with its own character and rules set, that participation at times felt like it fit the legal definition of insanity. In this time, we've told a lot of stories, running a gamut from murder mysteries to science fiction. We've told a lot of jokes. We've packed our logbooks with a lot of flying hours. And we've consistently had the most active threads on flightsim.com. We've also seen each other through illnesses, major surgeries, and health scares to our spouses. To repeat a comment I made early on: Sometimes it's more than just pushing pixels around screens. There are real people behind the screen names. And we're still here, and more people are flying events with us each time. So, to paraphrase Microsoft, Where Do We Want To Fly From Here? And, what will it take to get us there? That's the purpose of this meeting. Or to put it in business world terms, what are our goals for 2024 and what is the minimum structure necessary to facilitate their achievement? The fact that we've been flying together for six months now, doing it all by the seat of our pants, and we're still together is amazing. It's time now for a little more formality, so that we can all be together to do this again next year. To support this, we'll be using a four-phase process: Preliminary: A simple, broad questionnaire was posted on Friday, with the request to consider our answers in private. The purpose of this is twofold: To ensure that all responses are exclusively the yours and not built on someone else's, and to allow you to post your answers with a minimum of time and effort. This step is now complete. Individual Ideas: The second step is the posting of responses. Have your say about any of the questionnaire items that is important to you, and more importantly, consider what everyone else has to say before we start discussing it. This step begins now, and ends the earlier of all members having posted their responses to the questionnaire, or 12:00 CDT on Tuesday. Getting all responses in quickly will allow us more time for discussion. Discussion/Consensus Building: The third step starts when the second ends, and ends at end-of-day Wednesday, or earlier by agreement of the attendees. This one presents the logistical challenge of having to take place across the globe, while still finishing in a short amount of time. Individual Ideas will fall into one of three categories: Agreement: We've been flying together for a while and know each other's styles and capabilities, so all answers to a given question say much the same thing. These will boil down to simply formalizing what we're already doing. Easy! I Don't Agree, But I Can Live With It: Answers that differ sharply will need a negotiated solution. While the goal is to include everyone's ideas to their satisfaction, sometimes that will not prove possible. Consensus isn't about pleasing everyone, but rather about each of us conceding just enough to keep the others happy without our concessions becoming issues for us later on. Adamant Disagreement: Some things just cross a line. If you search your heart, are not just being petulant and trying to get your own way, and the move toward consensus is taking us somewhere that you are just unwilling to go, say so and we'll take a step back. What doesn't work for all of us doesn't work for any of us. Hopefully, these will be few and far between. These are the ones we most need to catch and resolve in the broadest, most imaginative sort of way, lest we start losing members. 2024 Club Bylaws Publication: The final step starts when the previous one ends. Ideally, we will have developed the text during the Discussion phase, and will only have to compile it into a cohesive document. From the moment of the document's publication, we will have 24 hours for edits and comment. Let me end this introduction with a preliminary Code of Conduct, to both govern this meeting and as my proposal for a more permanent Code: Disagree without being disagreeable. Be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and leave pursuing grudges in the box in the attic with all the rest of the things from our childhoods. Express ourselves, perhaps even insistently when a point's very important to us, but put finding a liveable consensus over winning a point. Let's all get on the same side of the table here and come up with answers, rather than going round and round in pointless arguments. This is a single-level group. No one's opinion has any more validity than anyone else's here. Whatever else we've been in the past, here we're all just fellow fliers, trying to have fun together. Whatever skills and knowledge that we've acquired throughout our lives only matter to the degree that we lay them on the table and use them to help our brothers-in-wings here. Leadership is a service here, not a position of privilege, and shall be undertaken only with the intent of improving our fellow fliers' enjoyment of the group. When something offends us, let's take 5 or even wait a day or two and make our response a considered Action, rather than a brute Reaction. As I used to tell my clients, "The one who unconsciously Reacts rather than consciously Acts. loses." Save Reacting for when you're on final into KCGX, past decision height, and that nice, 30-knot headwind suddenly drops to 0. We all have different skill and knowledge sets. Never ridicule a question, just because it seems too basic. Let's put ourselves in the other person's shoes, lace them up, and go for a nice, long walk. A lot of us are prideful people. Many of us have done a lot over our lifetimes. When we find ourselves with a group of other similarly-accomplished individuals, who are all talking about something we don't understand, we tend to not ask the million-and-one questions we have because we don't want to seem dumb. When we finally do screw up the courage to ask something, the worst thing that can happen is that someone laughs at us for it. All that does is confirm our feelings of inadequacy. When will we ask them another question? Never. When will we feel safe and confident around that someone or enjoy spending time with them? After we ask another question and receive a decent, honest response from them. English is the language for our interactions. We all have different levels of it. Even those of us who are native English speakers have vast national/regional/cultural differences in how we express ourselves. Let's not assume that a question or comment is understood by all - in fact, a more valid assumption is that at least one person here will not understand what we've said in the way that we intended it to come out. Ask. Clarify. Above all, let's be patient with each other. Any proposal for a route, Challenge, Fly-In, or any other activity that will require Club members to take action, is a commitment on the part of the proposer to both participate in the activity and to administer it. In other words, if it's your baby, you change the diapers. You may enlist help from other Club members, but this is strictly voluntary.