President's Perspective
Dave Brown, AMA president
The bottom line—it's time.
As this is being written, the year 2000 has just started, and the Y2K bug has just fizzled. For all of the hoopla, it sure didn't amount to much.
Oh sure, there were a few instances of problems—most of which were more humorous than tragic—but all in all, it wasn't a problem.
I guess I should be glad that AMA's recent mailing woes didn't occur at the first of the new year; we would have chased that Y2K bug to exhaustion. Come to think of it, that might not have been all that bad—at least we would have had something to blame it on!
One of the greatest "advances" of the 20th century is considered to be the Internet, and it has certainly enhanced our ability to communicate—not only among ourselves, but with the rest of the world.
An example of this was the tragedy in Great Britain, where a young man was killed by an out-of-control model at a model demonstration. Word of this accident spread very quickly around the world.
The results of the coroner's inquest were released and seemed to place a substantial part of the blame on "improper" settings of the failsafe system of the PCM radio used in the airplane. As a result, there has been considerable talk—again on the Internet—where "everyone" gets copies of everything, and that we "need to create rules on how these fail-safe systems should be set." Some of the rhetoric even points to requiring manufacturers to present them in a certain fashion.
While it is good to see that people are concerned, it is not good that all of this is headed toward a poor conclusion.
The accident was not caused by the "fail-safe" settings. As the coroner's inquest determined likely, it was caused by another transmitter being turned on at the flying site. The root cause was the other transmitter.
As with most tragedies, we have many lessons to learn.
- The paramount lesson is that failure to create and abide by a frequency control system can have fatal consequences.
- Another lesson is that there is no such thing as a "fail-safe" system. We have systems with "failure-mode programmability," which can be programmed to do certain things in certain types of failures.
- We also learned that the vast majority of people who use radios with these features don't know enough about them to use them to their best advantage.
The problem is more education than rules. We need to concentrate on making sure we know how to use those features in a manner appropriate to the type of model and the situation presented.
There is no single setting of those systems that is appropriate for all situations. I fully agree that "throttle off" is the best setting the majority of the time, but not always. In a helicopter, you certainly do not want that.
The Internet has enabled us to be aware of another potential risk involved in what we do, but let's not let the rhetoric push us into adopting rules that don't make sense.
There is no such thing as "fail-safe"; perhaps we should consider another term, lest our new members and the uninitiated take it at face value.
A few of you have questioned the fact that we are building a new Headquarters building, and have asked where and when this was debated. You need to go way back to the consideration of property purchase—more than 10 years ago.
When we initially decided to pursue ownership of property, many alternatives were discussed. Among them were:
- regional sites,
- financing for local club sites,
- flying-site only,
- Museum,
- Headquarters facility.
When the final criteria were shaken out (almost a two-year process), we settled on a single site for the Museum and Headquarters.
The actual decision of whether to move Headquarters to whatever site we bought was made part of the criteria for the site we elected; this principally involved the infrastructure of the area where it was to be located.
Ultimately, Muncie was the site we purchased. We rejected a number of locations that were wonderful flying sites because they were in areas where there wasn't any way you could have run a Headquarters operation.
We were still debating the pros and cons of where the Headquarters location should be; there were advantages on both sides. We really needed more Headquarters space, so we decided to construct a building in Muncie to house the Museum, allowing us to expand the Headquarters operations into the area occupied by the Museum in the Reston, VA building.
We had a plan, and it would allow us more time to consider the longer-term Headquarters issue. The museum building was constructed in Muncie, the museum contents were moved, and Headquarters had the additional floorspace it needed.
We operated this way for a little while, and learned that a remote operation isn't the easiest way to make things work well, but the longer-term Headquarters situation was still up for grabs.
About that time, the Chamber of Commerce in Muncie had a study done of our Headquarters operation, which determined that we would "save" $600,000 in annual operating costs by moving the Headquarters to Muncie. I must admit that I viewed this with a lot of skepticism, but we were not about to ignore it.
We had an independent firm (from Washington, D.C.) do a study, and it determined that the Muncie study had underestimated the savings by about 10%!
The die was cast: Headquarters would move to Muncie, but we couldn't afford to construct a new building yet. We considered a location in downtown Muncie that was offered to us, but we settled on squeezing the Headquarters operation into the same building with the Museum, foregoing the planned expansion of the Museum.
The cost of the move would be $300,000, so we were going to break even after six months. The plan was to sell the Reston building, and use the proceeds to buy a new facility in Muncie. However, we couldn't find a buyer for the Reston building, and ended up having to lease it out on a lease/purchase deal.
In the meantime, membership numbers were slowly dropping—only 2–3% per year—which was not a trend that suggested expansion. Our "temporary" situation regarding Headquarters remained.
In the last two years, the situation has finally presented itself to continue the plan made way back when we first decided to purchase property. Membership climbed last year and is climbing even more rapidly this year. The Reston property has been sold, and the money was put aside for a new Headquarters building.
In today's atmosphere, it is becoming harder and harder to attract and keep good people working in a small, temporary office. We have more than half of the money earmarked for the project, and we can afford the rest. We need a better facility if we are going to continue to provide high levels of service.
The bottom line—it's time.
'Till next month,
Dave
Dave Brown AMA president [email protected]
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
