Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, be read to, imagine, create, and understand.
If you spend five minutes on Google searching imagination, you are immediately confronted with the debate of what’s more important: knowledge or imagination. Then of course there’s the conversation about which came first …
I want to approach imagination this month from a perspective that simply says it is critical to possess—that’s not to put imagination before knowledge, or say that either one has more value in successful learning. For this month’s conversation, let’s just say it’s got to be there! For this month’s conversation, let’s just say it’s got to be there!
Most of us have experienced firsthand the wonderment of a child looking to the sky, watching things that fly. With no regard to how anything works, most immediately want to be a bird, to experience the freedom that flight has to offer. Does this really ever change for many of us?
The challenge we face in aviation is simply getting people to look up and not be passive about things that fly. I remember as a youth being involved in CL with my dad.
Mom attended an annual convention in Indianapolis and always brought something back for me. One year it was a CL P-40 Warhawk, shark’s mouth and all. I loved that airplane, so much that I would just lie beside it on the floor looking at it from all possible angles.
I got that airplane in the fall and didn’t even start it, let alone fly it, until the following summer. It was so cool to look at and imagine it flying! To this day I’ve dreamed of owning and flying another one. Many years later, that dream is still alive. I’ve flown hundreds of model airplanes, owned more than I would ever admit to, and there’s not a P-40 on the list—at least not yet!
Whenever I speak publicly about model aviation, there are two things that I include: we have the ultimate video game and the ultimate fantasy. The imagination of youth, still alive and well, allows us to enjoy the fantasy of flight through that imagination we all share. Only through our imagination during the fantasy of flight does model aviation allow us to fly anything we can imagine—even a P-40!
The average age of today’s AMA member is 50-plus years old, so a great number of our members enjoyed a childhood with a father who was a veteran, most probably from World War II or Korea. It’s only natural that many of our childhood fantasies continue today in our imagination through model aviation. The other day I received a list that is an amazing compilation of World War I and II aircraft.
Three times this week our office has been contacted by frustrated members (two of the three with children) expressing their anger with some of our clubs and the welcome they didn’t receive! If your club doesn’t offer training, I understand. If your club isn’t accepting new members, I understand. If your club has nothing but world-class pilots who are busy working on gear, sequences, etc., I understand.
The thing I don’t understand is being rude and aggressively negative with people who have taken the time to find a club flying site, loaded the kids up (thinking they will really like this and might be something the family could enjoy together), and are at best completely ignored—at worst treated as if they’re trespassing. In this lifetime I will never understand this.
I’ll assure you that all of us have benefited from others along the way. How does someone suddenly decide that it stops with them? Don’t be that person.
Not everyone will champion the fun of model aviation all of the time, but give a guest 30 seconds to share the AMA website and the find-a-club feature located on the home page. The people you see flying in the park, school facilities, and other urban locations, do so because they have park flyer-style airplanes and helis and have, in many cases, been turned away by an AMA member while visiting a local club.
Seriously? I thought we all shared the imagination of the sky and the fantasy of flight. I still think we do. If you’ve misplaced yours, look around. It’s easy to find!
Fly and have fun!
