by Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien with the ANN Cast of Thousands

"Christmas? A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket once a year." - E. Scrooge.

We're coming to the end of the year, and you all know what that means… along with chasing the popular toys through mobbed malls, enduring puerile, saccharine Christmas Muzak, and bearing up under a ceaseless barrage of Year in Review prose, you have to face the close of the tax year. Ouch.

One way to swing a double-edged sword of reducing your pre-tax income and promoting a worthwhile cause is to donate to a tax-deductible (in the USA) charity, such as the AOPA Air Safety Foundation.

The Air Safety Foundation does an awful lot of good, and the vast majority of its output is available free. I have a "safety binder" of ASF materials, and you can too (at the cost of a few hours on the website [http://www.asf.org] and a bunch of printer paper). I've enjoyed and benefited from ASF seminars as well, and you can too (you can even get the materials for putting on the seminar yourself, for the cost of shipping and handling only).  It's our donations that make all this possible.

How many of us have cajoled a non-flying spouse, significant other, POSSLQ (yes, that's a real Census acronym), or squeeze into attending a "Pinch-Hitter" course? Guess what - that's designed by ASF, and ASF depends on our donations to put it on.

Whether you give a dime to ASF or not, you have benefited from the research that it does, research that has helped knock the GA safety rate down to the very low 6.3 mishaps per 100,000 flying hours. The ASF works hand-in-glove with the FAA so that their efforts, rather than wastefully duplicating one another, complement and extend each other. Our donations make it happen.

Another thought: most of us have lost flying buddies, whether to disease, aviation mishaps, or really dangerous activities like driving. What better way to perpetuate a friend's name than to make a donation in his or her memory, to an organization that will spend that money on safety education and research? Perhaps the gift you give will make all the difference so that someone ten years from know is enjoying, rather than missing, his or her flying buddy, Our donations can make it so.

There's lots of government research and university research (most of which is funded by tax dollars for the public good) that you'll never hear about, and can't even learn about or read unless you're lucky enough to have access to a great aviation library like Embry-Riddle's Hunt Library or the library at UND. ASF research never sits forgotten on a shelf. It's put to immediate use, educating pilots and saving lives (not to mention machines, and money).

I know it's been a rough year - no one knows that better than I - and not everyone can make a donation, or use a tax deduction. If that describes you I'm sorry, and I wish you better fortune in 2004. Please do go to the ASF website and study some of the well-done safety stuff there - this is one place where it truly makes sense for the better-off to help the less-well-off (because safety benefits us all). But if you can give, and especially if you're itemizing deductions, please consider a donation to ASF.

"Please give us the money," ASF Executive Director Bruce Landsberg asked me to ask you directly. "You know we can make better use of it than the Federal government."

So, please, in the interests of safety, give Bruce the money. 90% of ASF's $5 million annual budget comes from donations, and almost all of that is individual donations from individual pilots like us. The money comes right back into our community and works to keep us safe.

FMI: http://www.asf.org