Welcome to our online version of the COPA
Aviation Directory. This one-stop source of information about flying in
Canada has been available in a paper magazine format for a number of years under
the name Canadian Flight Annual. The disadvantage of the paper format was
that most of the information was “time sensitive” and could be as much as three
months out of date when the magazine was printed and more than 15 months out of
date by the time the next annual magazine was printed.
On the other hand, our Web site, and members’ use of it, has been steadily
growing. A few years ago, we transitioned time sensitive information, such as
flight school contact information, to the Web site. By 2001 we had two parallel
sources of information with much more available on the Web site.
Our 2002 survey of our members indicated that 92% have access to the Internet,
so we decided to take advantage of this fact to transition from the magazine
format Canadian Flight Annual to the online Canadian Flight Annual.
This move accomplished two important things: we can update information and have
it available for you immediately and we can also incorporate information, such
as clickable maps to help find a flight school, which wasn’t possible in hard
copy format.
This year we have changed the name of the publication from the Canadian
Flight Annual to the COPA Aviation Directory as we feel that the new
title does a better job of describing exactly what it is! Being online, it is
updated “daily” instead of “annually.”
I hope that you enjoy the new format and find it useful. I welcome your comments
at webmaster@copanational.org to help improve it.
Kevin Psutka
COPA's President and CEO