The IMC Club, which has grown to about 130 chapters with nearly 3,000 members, now has completed its acquisition by EAA, Radek Wyrzykowski, founder and president of the club, told AVweb on Monday. “All IMC Club members will automatically become EAA members,” effective immediately, he said. Going forward, all members of the IMC Club can continue their EAA membership, which will include access to all the IMC Club content. “So for example, if there’s an airport that now has both an IMC Club and an EAA chapter, the IMC Club members will become members of the EAA chapter,” Wyrzykowski said. The IMC Club programs of “organized hangar flying” will continue, and will be available to both the former IMC members and the EAA members, at no added cost.
“It’s very exciting,” Wyrzykowski said. “It means the IMC Club will be free, which is what I always wanted. A lot of IMC Club members already belong to EAA.” IMC Clubs that don’t have an EAA chapter nearby will become an EAA chapter, he said, and then it’s up to those members how they want to proceed. If they want to continue to focus just on IMC Club programming, that’s fine. “They don’t have to become a full EAA chapter, if they don’t want to, but they can,” he said. Under the agreement, the IMC Club becomes a subsidiary of EAA, and Wyrzykowski will become Manager of Flight Proficiency for EAA IMC. This allows the club to take advantage of the vast infrastructure already built by EAA, which has more than 190,000 members and nearly 900 chapters, and will allow Wyrzykowski to focus on developing content for the club meetings. “I will continue to run the Club, but from within EAA,” he said.
