I strongly agree that the OLC has done more to gain positive momentum
in our sport recently than most anything else. We hope that pilots in
the US will help to show their overwhelming support by pitching in
something to help keep it going strong, and growing.

Personally, I am pleased so far with the participation. Thank you
all!

It is true that the challenge is to make it as easy as possible for
pilots to make donations efficiently to the OLC effort with the
minimum time and financial burden on SSA staff and volunteers.
Suggesting that hundreds of checks for $6 each arriving in Hobbs would
not be a good idea. It turns out that it's hard to find a perfectly
"free" solution. Amazon does take a small cut out of each donation.
But it does make small donations practical and is an efficient way to
funnel money through the appropriate accounts, which in the end result
in a wire transfer to OLC. PayPal was also discussed (which has equal
loads), but in the end we decided that Amazon demonstrated less
potential for problems and we felt that Amazon accounts were probably
already fairly common among our pilots.

This is not to say that in the future there will not be a better way
to collect the money. Good ideas are always welcome.

Brian Resor
SSA-OLC Committee Member