Features and benefits
The Flying Neutrons has many practical, financial, social, and other benefits. Click here for a detailed description of all that the Flying Neutrons has to offer!

History
The Flying Neutrons Inc is one of the nation's oldest member-owned flying clubs, dedicated to providing safe and low-cost flying. The club was founded in 1952 by engineers from the nearby GE engine plant in Evendale OH, which is now one of the world's largest jet engine facilities. The engineers in 1952 were designing a nuclear aircraft engine for strategic bombers. They succeeded in a workable engine, but never were able to solve the crashworthiness issue and so the engine was never deployed. The spirit of thoroughness, precision and innovation you would expect from nuclear aviation engineers continues today.

Membership
The roster contains up to 120 senior members, and usually hovers at or near that mark. Openings occur as people leave the area, and turnover averages about 5% annually. The clubs leadership is elected annually from member volunteers.

Fees
You can join at one of two levels, depending on which aircraft you want to fly:

• Senior member eligible to fly all airplanes ($2000 initiation)
• Senior member eligible to fly the two Cessna Skyhawks only ($1000 initiation)

There is also a monthly fee to cover fixed costs, currently $50.00, and the hourly rates for each airplane, which are listed on the Our Fleet page.

Operations approach and rules

Safety:	Our rules in aircraft usage and currency are focused on maximising safety with minimal impact on convenience
Competence:	We require annual check rides to assure each member is able to handle the aircraft with the care of an owner
Flexibility:	We offer on-line scheduling up to a year in advance, taking the plane for up to 14 days and only paying for engine time, and 24 hour access to the clubroom and keys
Scheduling:	Web based on-line scheduling (with 800 number phone access) makes scheduling and related tasks easy and always available as long as you have access to a PC or to a phone.

Maintenance
Aircraft are maintained to strict standards with daily review of squawks by our mechanic and full aircraft inspections on a 125 hour schedule. A corporate Maintenance Officer manages the individual plane captains, who focus on one plane. This results in high attention to detail and high availability of our aircraft. FNI also has a standing New Equipment Committee that reviews new or improved technology and recommends to the membership when the upgrades should be deployed to the fleet. In 2004, for example, we upgraded and standardized all of our GPS to Garmin 430 and installed JPI 700 Engine analyzers. This was after a six month evaluation period in one of our aircraft to determine effectiveness, user issues and an overall cost/benefit review.

Financial Strength
FNI is one of the nation's oldest clubs for several reasons, but one of them is prudent financial management. Without losing our focus on keeping costs low, we reserve the appropriate amounts to cover scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, an ongoing program of repainting and new interiors, and maintaining a reserve fund for avionics upgrades. This means the club has never had a supplemental assessment to cover expenses. Fixed expenses are covered from the monthly dues, so if we don't fly that month for some reason - flight restrictions or weather would be possibilities - we can pay for all fixed expenses, including insurance, hanger/tiedowns and the clubroom. Variable expenses are covered from the hourly charges. This covers scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, repainting and new interiors, avionics upgrades, and fuel/oil costs.

Insurance
All members are covered under the FNI insurance policy when operating our aircraft.