Positive publicity needed. Please be thinking of ways to produce positive publicity for your club and our hobby this coming year. Many clubs do a lot for their community, such as a Branson, Missouri, club that gathers toys each year and donates them to the local hospital’s children’s ward at Christmastime.
National Model Aviation Day has become another great way to generate positive publicity for the hobby. I know there are many other clubs in the district doing things that are newsworthy.
Don’t be afraid to blow your own horn. Submit new releases to the local and national news media. Let them know of the good things you are doing for your community. We need all the positive publicity we can get.
There has been a huge amount of negative publicity of late, much of which has been driven by the FAA requesting every sighting of a drone or small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS) be filed with them.
It is fine to know about those sightings, but of the 194 sightings recently made public, many are not actually a safety concern as the news media would have you believe. Many have inconclusive data, but seem to make it to the news media in the form of negative publicity for modelers.
To date, none of the incidents have been associated with modelers following AMA safety guidelines. Fortunately, no full-scale aircraft has had a collision with a model. We need to find ways educate what many of us would consider “non-traditional modelers,” those who buy the easy-to-fly quadcopters at the mall or by ordering them online who may not understand the damage they can cause. I’m open to suggestions.
Indoor flying has become popular during the winter months. I recently got to spend some time with the Jefferson City Radio Control club’s indoor flying venue.
The club has worked out an arrangement with the local YMCA to use a basketball court and the area that houses four indoor tennis courts. This allows for two areas to fly in. They can also turn out the lights in one of the rooms to simulate night flying. The sessions draw fliers from as far away as St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri.
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Approximately the time this issue will reach you, it will be time for the Hobbico-hosted eFest indoor event (http://hobbico-efest.com), held at the University of Illinois Track and Field Armory at 505 East Armory in Champaign, Illinois. I plan to be there again this year, so if you happen to be there, swing by the AMA booth and say hello.
Donald Way has been doing an outstanding job of maintaining and updating the District VI Facebook page located at www.facebook.com/AMADistrictVI. If you haven’t visited it, you are missing out on lots of good information.
You’re welcome to add event flyers to the page. Facebook is all about likes, so feel free to “Like” the page as well as the postings.
Don, thank you for all the work you do on not only the Facebook page, but also the District VI website. It is much appreciated.
I need photos and articles to help fill this page.
Until next month, happy modeling![dingbat]
