The most common thing I hear about NBAA membership is that it is the cost of doing business, and people say it in the tone they reserve for expenses they wished they weren’t paying. I want to make a stronger case for it than that, because the association is one of the few line items in this industry where what you get back is directly proportional to whether anyone from your operation ever shows up.
Start with Cleveland, since it just resolved.
Mayor Bibb wanted Burke Lakefront closed. That is not an unusual position for a mayor to hold about a waterfront airport sitting on land that developers would happily take off the city's hands. If you have been in this business long enough, you have watched that argument win. On August 14, in Oberlin, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said flatly that the FAA is not in favor of closing Burke. Senator Bernie Moreno said there is no scenario in which it closes, and called it absurd for a politician to override the FAA's own analysis. Senator Husted's office said the same thing in more careful language. That is the end of it, practically speaking.
Now look at what those men were holding when they said it. An Ohio DOT study putting Burke at $195 million in direct annual economic activity, 664 jobs, reliever capacity for Cleveland Hopkins, and a training field feeding an industry that cannot produce enough pilots and mechanics. Two letters signed by more than 50 Cleveland-area business, education, and civic leaders. A coalition that had been grinding on this for months, with NBAA in it, and private meetings with the Administrator and both senators well before anybody was standing in front of a camera. The mayor was not beaten by an argument made in August. He was beaten by work finished long before he made his move.
Two more quick examples, because the pattern repeats. Washington state had already enacted a tax on most general aviation aircraft with an April 1 start date, and PNBAA and NBAA pulled in hundreds of members and got it repealed before it ever touched an owner's bill. And when the 2025 tax law brought back 100% bonus depreciation, it left a gap for anyone who had signed a purchase agreement before January 20 but took delivery after that date, which applied to many deals already in motion. NBAA's Tax Committee had the technical position written and published for members before the IRS weighed in. When Notice 2026-11 came out in January, it confirmed what the committee had already documented.
That last one is a great example of how engagement actually works.
The Tax Committee is not lobbyists. It is practicing aviation tax attorneys and CPAs who volunteered, and they had a defensible position on file because they deal with 280F and placed-in-service questions for a living. Same story with the Safety Committee, which ended up seated for ALERT Act implementation rather than reading about it afterward. The association's real asset is not its Washington office. It is a few hundred practitioners who agreed to do committee work, and every one of them got there because somebody met them at an event and made a note.
I sit on the Business Aviation Management Committee, which hosts the Leadership Conference every year. I can tell you that nobody has ever been recruited onto a committee out of a database. It happens in hallways, after sessions, when someone asks a question that makes it obvious they care. If you have people in your operation you are trying to develop into leaders, that is the mechanism, and it does not run without attendance.
Which is the uncomfortable part of the ask. Attending a trade show does not feel like advocacy. It can feel like a hotel bill in Las Vegas and three days away from an operation that needs you, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But NBAA's leverage on Capitol Hill is a function of how many operators it can credibly claim and how many of those it can reach and mobilize inside of a week when something lands on one of us. Dues alone do not build that. Bodies in rooms do. BACE is October 20 through 22 in Las Vegas. If you are an owner, look at the whole week rather than the show floor, because the Tax, Regulatory and Risk Management Conference runs the 18th and 19th and puts you in a room with the same attorneys who write the positions the IRS eventually responds to. Aircraft Connection is out at Henderson on the 20th and 21st with PDP courses running alongside all of it.
And if you are thinking about leadership development rather than tax, our Leadership Conference is February 8 through 10 in Tucson, with a one-day PDP course on building a personal leadership vision on the 8th. That one is smaller and, honestly, better for the kind of conversations that change how somebody runs a department.
Go once with the intent of finding out who is in the room. If you have been going for years and treating it as a vendor tour, take a different pass this time and sit in on an advocacy session. The wins above exist because a few hundred people did exactly that, and the next round depends entirely on whether we keep enough of them doing it.