Page 8 - Volume 14 Number 4

Mark Baker has owned this Piper Super Cub for nearly 30 years. Here he shares it with visitors during an AOPA pancake breakfast.
That’s saying a lot for a pilot who has owned more than 100 airplanes and has logged in the neighborhood of 15,000 hours during 40 years of flying aircraft ranging from helicopters to light seaplanes and turbines. Among his ratings and certificates, he has his commercial pilot certificate, single- and multi-engine seaplane ratings, rotorcraft rating, and type ratings in the Cessna Citation 500 and 525S.
Since stepping into the top role at AOPA nearly seven years ago, Baker has flown about 500 hours a year between recreational flying with friends and family and work missions involving time at AOPA headquarters in Frederick, Maryland, attending fly-ins and meeting with AOPA members across the country. AOPA is a nonprofit membership-based organization providing educational and advocacy to more than 300,000 general aviation
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pilots and aircraft owners. He also leads International Council of Aircraft Owner and Pilot Associations (IAOPA), a federation of autonomous, nongovernmental, national general aviation organizations in 80 countries.
A lifelong love of aviation
Aviation intrigued Baker as a kid, although nobody in his family was a pilot. His grandfather had worked through World War II putting spark plugs in B-24 bombers at the St. Paul (Minnesota) Downtown Airport, and his dad worked as a cleaner for regional North Central Airlines while in school.
It was the 1970s when Baker started ground school while a high schooler and figured out a way to get to the airport most Saturdays. He worked on his license ›
APRIL 2020