move to the asphalt site.
Now I have to tell you one funny story
and I’ll admit to having had to work hard to
avoid laughing in the face of one
competitor. I was at the Carrier site on the
asphalt when a competitor lodged the only
real complaint I heard involving the
weather—and he was complaining about
dust!
To say that I had a hard time keeping a
straight face would be an understatement,
but believe it or not it was a legitimate
problem. The high winds that followed the
frontal passage dried out the dirt areas
upwind of the pad. The recent construction
hadn’t allowed the grass to fill in and it was
blowing dust across the asphalt pad! Given
the circumstances, it sure gave me a lighter
moment.
Among the comments I heard was that
floats would be useful and the common joke
was that we needed to equip the sites with
lifeboats. I was proud of the way everyone
handled this catastrophe. The staff—and in
particular the maintenance crew—did
yeomen’s service moving stuff, rearranging
sites, rebuilding sites, replacing damaged
equipment, creating detours, etc.
The competitors did their part, pitching
in to keep things going, and everyone did so
with an attitude of “we can do this.” I heard
many complaints about the weather (what’s
new about that?), but not a single individual
was defeatist. The prevailing attitude was
that “we can do this” and “we” did.
I congratulate the staff, the event
directors, and all of the competitors for their
handling of this extreme weather and
particularly for their positive attitude in
doing so. The news folks report this as the
worst flooding in 80 years. Hopefully it will
THE NATIONAL Aeromodeling
Championships (Nats) is in progress as this
is being written, and this year the Nats
theme song should be “Row, Row, Row
Your Boat!” I have seen a lot of Nats where
we had problems with rain, but this one
takes the cake. The amazing part of this
saga is that it has had little effect on the
actual flying. All of the events have been
flown pretty well on schedule.
On July 4, a monsoon started that
resulted in central Indiana being declared a
disaster area by the federal government.
Amazingly though, the modelers
persevered, competed, won, lost, and
generally did their thing.
How much rain did we get? We don’t
measure it at the site itself, but most of the
surrounding areas reported upward of 18
inches between July 4 and July 10! If
anyone had told me that we could fly on
schedule through such a calamity I would
have thought they were batty; however,
most of the rain fell in the late afternoons
and throughout the nights. The daytime
hours were … er …“dry” … in at least the
sense of not raining most of the time.
Underfoot—and perhaps over boots—
was another story. Flooding forced some
events to higher ground and even stranded
some people at the southernmost site for a
while. Detours around flooded roads
became common and were taken in stride.
We had portions of roads on the site under
as much as two or three feet of water.
The flying sites themselves remained
usable with the exception of the 600 x 600-
foot grass field where Control Line (CL)
Combat was scheduled. Those participants
were forced to higher ground twice! The
second move involved towing a lot of cars
out of the muddy field. They ended up
flying Combat in the area adjacent to the
Event Headquarters building and that
seemed to work out well. Carrier had to be
moved onto the new asphalt CL site, as they
were also scheduled to use the 600 x 600-
foot site.
Unfortunately, as the weather front
moved out we had one day that was
extremely windy and we lost a number of
CL models in Stunt and Carrier. The
Carrier attrition was exacerbated by the
Dave Brown AMA president
President’s Perspective
be the last time we have to deal with this
much water.
This Nats has unfortunately involved some
tragedy. On July 9, a CL competitor, Jerry
Meyer, collapsed while walking along the
road. He was rushed to the hospital where
he died early the next morning. I offer my
condolences to his loved ones.
The next day another competitor
collapsed and was rushed to the hospital
where he underwent surgery. Thank
goodness we keep an emergency medical
technician (EMT) on site for medical
emergencies. The Delaware County
Emergency Medical Service (EMS) facility
is on the northwest corner of our property
so response time is fast. We think of this
service as being used for injuries, but given
the demographics of our participants,
situations like these are bound to happen.
We plan to add to the emergency
medical equipment we keep on the site.
Although it wasn’t a factor in these
instances, we plan to purchase a
defibrillator (automatic) and other
equipment to be better prepared. Indiana
law prohibits individual EMTs from taking
EMS equipment to locations such as ours
for standby purposes, so we need to
purchase our own for the EMTs to use as
needed.
We plan to send some of our own people
to classes at the EMS station to be better
prepared for medical emergencies. The
EMS workers can get to us in less than five
minutes, but those first five minutes can be
important in a medical emergency. MA
October 2003 5
How much rain did
we get?
Dave Brown
AMA president
[email protected]
Edition: Model Aviation - 2003/10
Page Numbers: 5
