President's Perspective
Dave Brown, AMA president
WHERE TO START?
Let's begin with the fact that AMA Headquarters has moved into the new building and the staff is beginning to get acclimated to the new digs.
The move seems to have gone reasonably well, but the new telephone system created a few hiccups and for a couple of days it was like playing roulette to get through. For a while, all we had were a couple of cell phones and a call-forwarding system to work with.
This new building is quite a sight, and it has created a sense of pride among the staff that had not been there in the past.
Through some really good work by the Building Committee, chaired by Chuck Foreman, this building was constructed for $108 per square foot, and it includes an elevator and the latest in geothermal climate control.
The facility was designed to ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) standards, which makes it accessible to people with disabilities, and it should serve our needs far into the future.
It's a good investment to provide our employees with a place to work that is appropriate for their dedication. It should also instill pride among the membership. Ask anyone in the construction business, and he or she will tell you that $108 per square foot is a bargain.
The FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale) CIAM (International Aeromodelling Committee) meetings held in March were interesting, and I think the US did quite well.
Probably the most significant rules change for us is the weight increase for F4C (Radio Control [RC] Scale) models to 15 pounds. This should encourage more participation in the event in the US.
Among the more controversial items was the proposal to move the course workers (except for the starter) off the course in RC pylon. The irony is that most of the controversy came after the meeting, when it became unclear exactly what had been voted on. As this is being written, I still don't know where this stands.
I was elected to succeed Werner Groth as second vice president, so we now have two Americans on the Bureau for the first time since John Worth and Johnny Clemens were there in the 1970s.
Unfortunately, just a few days after we had returned from Switzerland, we received word that Werner had passed away. The world of international aeromodelling will miss him; he was a stalwart of the sport as well as a good personal friend.
Many Americans will remember him as a member of the jury in many World Championships.
Next up was the Toledo, Ohio trade show. The perennial mecca of aeromodelling was as big as ever. A couple of meetings were held on the subject of park flyers and "what to do with them."
- The Frequency Committee meeting considered the technical possibilities of park flyers. The committee determined that there was no acceptable technical solution for the problems created by these aircraft, and that this was really an issue where education was needed rather than rules.
- A meeting the next day with some manufacturers of park flyers came to the same conclusion, and it was decided that an attempt will be made to provide more frequency information with the kits.
This sounds easier than it is, as most of these kits are mass-produced in the Orient and shipped to all corners of the world. Including specific frequency information in the kits for each country will be quite difficult, and the idea of opening each kit to add this information after it arrives in the US would be nearly impossible to do in an economical fashion.
For the time being, it was decided to look into the possibility of a website that could contain all of the information for each country in the appropriate language. This site's address would be highlighted on each kit. This seems like a reasonable solution to educating the consumers who are purchasing these units, but that is only half of the education problem.
The other half of the problem is us! Our club members are going to find themselves faced with a dilemma in which they may have to choose between opening up their memberships to these new modelers or facing the potential of losing models because of the interference they create.
I realize many members will say that they shouldn't be allowed to interfere with us, but the plain fact is that unless they and us become we, we are going to face a nasty problem.
I have already heard reports of AMA clubs keeping potential members from joining, then finding out that the alternative is having the park flyers use a site nearby and creating interference.
The only solution is for the AMA clubs to figure out how to allow these new people to join them. This means that those clubs with restricted memberships will have to reconsider their limits. I know this will not be too popular with some clubs, but there is no other way to make this work.
These park flyers are selling like wildfire, reportedly at a rate of 4-to-1 compared to "regular" model airplanes, and they are not going away in the near future.
Additionally, the success rate of flying them is very high, and I am quite sure that a much higher percentage of these are actually flown than the more conventional models. At the same time, more survive that first flight.
Right now we are fortunate, in that most of these park flyers are being sold through the normal hobby channels, so we have a shot at creating a system to handle them. In the future I suspect that they will expand to the mass markets of RadioShack™, Toys "R" Us™, Wal-Mart™, etc., and we will be in a lot of trouble if we haven't figured out a way to embrace them.
The next event was Sun 'n' Fun at Lakeland, Florida, where a chance meeting may result in some good things for aeromodelling, but it's premature to say anything yet.
Your tired-of-traveling president,
Dave
Dave Brown AMA president <REDACTED>
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
