NAAA eNewsletter - 01/12/2023

If you have already renewed your NAAA membership for 2023, thank you! If you have not, please renew your membership today. You can renew online or over the phone at (202) 546-5722. Set yourself up for success in the new year by renewing your NAAA membership for 2023.

NAAA is committed to creating a positive business climate, promoting safety and professionalism, improving the industry’s public image, and influencing policy in a way that is beneficial to the aerial application industry. Our industry’s importance to global food, fiber and bioenergy production comes at a crucial time as NAAA fights to ensure the aerial use of pesticides remains available and abundant while other government and activist interests work to cancel or impose unnecessary and burdensome use restrictions. It takes your membership resources to save these aerial uses and positively represent the industry before the public.

Resources supplied by your membership are what allows for NAAA to succeed on many issues, including the fighting and winning on important issues like exemptions from FAA user fees and federal fuel excise taxes; tower marking requirements; safety requirements for drones flying near manned, low-altitude aircraft; and as stated above, ensuring EPA keeps a healthy inventory of pesticide products for aerial use without unnecessary restrictions.

As the industry enters its second century, NAAA and NAAREF have developed a way to augment industry advancement of safety and application accuracy while showing your customers, regulators, insurers, pesticide manufacturers, and the public the professional nature of the industry. Our new Certified-Professional Aerial Applicator Safety Steward (C-PAASS) program, launching this year, will fill that very role for those that want to participate. We know education works to reduce accidents and drift occurrences based on PAASS program stats. Since the first PAASS season in 1998-1999, the ag aviation accident rate (number of accidents per 100,000 hours flown) has dropped by nearly 26%, and the fatal accident rate has dropped by 10%.

The impetus for developing C-PAASS was to expand and gain recognition for maximizing professionalism by ultimately receiving additional benefits for being certified, such as insurance discounts and more flexibility pertaining to pesticide label language and for ag pilots to market to their customers that they have undergone additional training and development to best ensure that they can provide high-quality service.

Please make it a priority to renew your NAAA membership—the payoff far exceeds what you will spend in dues in the form of effective advocacy that reduces regulation and taxes affecting your aerial application business, and trade association membership dues are tax deductible.

Some membership benefits include:

Complimentary one-hour legal consultation on Federal Transportation Laws to Operator and Pilot Members.
Receive markedly reduced attendee and/or exhibitor fees to attend the Ag Aviation Expo.
Receive the highly sought-after print and online NAAA Membership Directory, where you can find members and allied services in the industry.
Stay up to date on the latest issues affecting your profession through Association publications, the NAAA eNewsletter, social media briefings and substantive web content at agaviation.org, as well as our Media Relations Kit.
NAAA membership plus participation in Ag Aviation Expo sessions, PAASS and Operation S.A.F.E. Fly-ins offer pilots and operators several ways to improve professionalism, earn potential CEUs, and achieve discounts through their insurance providers.