to our members’ needs, and creating resources to better equip them.” Setting the narrative and being proactive in telling stories about the importance of General Aviation has never been more important. Like businesses in every other industry, many NATA members were eligible and applied for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans under the CARES Act. In the first eight weeks of the quarantine period beginning in March 2020, when the CARES Act was passed and loan applications first became available, year-over-year business was down by as much as 90 percent for nearly all of the NATA membership. “That’s a number we’ve been using as a benchmark,” said Freye. “General Aviation is diverse and important to so many communities in America; and, yes, our industry was hit just as hard as any other by the pandemic, is still working to recover, and, in some cases, is still in need of some assistance. While calls for transparency in relief programs are founded, it’s easy to become a target and let that narrative get away from you. I hope our mem- bers will think about how to talk more proactively about the contributions they’re making. Or, to put it another way, I hope, out of the magnifying glass being put on our industry, the role and contributions of General Aviation become more clear, and it also becomes more clear to policy makers that our industry is a critical component of the national economy.” Freye—who worked as a Senior Policy Advisor on Capitol Hill for three years prior to joining NATA and served as a public information officer and Federal Government Affairs Representative for Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority for three years before that—said the timing felt right to share some of his expertise and experience in speaking with reporters among the NATA membership; and, he expects further scrutiny on all Paycheck Protection Program loan recipi- ents in the coming months. Explained Freye, “What generally happens is these things ebb and flow, and within six to seven months, I think you’ll see Congress shift from implementing the programs to beginning to ramp up some of the oversight hearings and calling in the various Federal agencies, asking ‘Who did you give money to? How did you decide Aviation Business Journal | Summer 2020 to give the money out? Why did you decide to give it to person X?’ That’s when the stories will start coming back up. As you know, our industry can be narrowly portrayed as exclusive transportation for the wealthy, and those stories can become less about the contributions that general aviation makes for the global economy and more about tax breaks for the wealthy.” For Aviation Business Journal readers who may not see the webinar, we asked Freye to distill some of his key points. “From my time as a public information officer for a major airports authority, these are five things that were always top of mind when I approach any interaction with the media,” Freye said. His insight includes: Define the Rules of Engagement • Proceed with caution. The first rule to consider, when answering a request from a reporter, is to remember that you’re always on the record when speaking with a journalist. Once you start enter- ing into a dialogue with a reporter, you can have a discussion with them about what’s on the record and what is on background, what I call ‘the lexicon of quotability,’ depending on what the story is that they’re writing and how central of a role you and your company may be to the story. Being on the record implies that your name and your position with the company are going to immediately follow your quote. Speaking off the record is something I don’t usually advise for a number of reasons, but there are some options between speaking on the record and off the record, and that includes speaking on background. The caution that I make about speaking on background is that the degrees of separation in an industry can be small. So, my advice to somebody in the aviation industry who is considering or being asked to speak on background is to make very clear with the reporter how that background information is going to be attributed. You want to know exactly how that attribution is going to appear in print, because if it is too specific, it can be blatantly obvious who made the quote even though your name is not attached to it. Continued on page 66 65
