President's Perspective
AMA and the modeling world lost one of its best on Christmas night, with the passing of AMA District VII Vice President Don Bentfield. While Don had served as a VP for a short two years, he had served for many years as an associate VP, and brought a fresh, yet experienced, perspective to the Executive Council. I remember a comment made by one of the other VPs after Don's first EC meeting: "Don is a breath of fresh air." Unfortunately, that breath of fresh air was called to a higher level, and will be terribly missed by those of us left behind. Dedicated to AMA right up to the end, Don and I talked just three days before Christmas when he expressed his strong desire that AVP Dave Gish serve out his term as VP.
President's Perspective
As with many organizations, AMA has developed by a process of evolution rather than revolution. It is an organization that has served aeromodeling well over the years, and it has become the premier organization of aeromodelers in the world. While the organization has changed slowly over the years through evolution, it has had its share of revolutionaries; it's just that most of those revolutionaries either faded away or became part of the "establishment." In fact, that last bit describes a couple of people you might just recognize.
President's Perspective: Vacation is over, back to work.
Each year, the officers of AMA give up one column to enable the magazine to enhance its coverage of the Nats. For some, it is a welcome respite, but for others, well, let's just say it is not a universally acclaimed policy. I actually did take a vacation trip this year and went to visit some aeromodeling friends in Ireland, and attend the wedding of the daughter of one of them. The trip proved, once again, that it's the people that make the sport of model aviation so great. Among the challenges your officers face is to develop a budget for the organization. It's an interesting process, which takes a lot of time. You usually start with establishing the assumptions of such factors as interest rates, inflation, and membership growth or shrinkage. Just establishing these factors can be very challenging, and a lot of guesswork is involved.
President's Perspective: AMA and its average member.
A few weeks ago, I spent an evening "solving the problems of the world" with a couple of other members of the Executive Council, and, as very often happens, the discussion drifted toward what AMA does, or could do, or should do, for its average members. It's natural for this discussion to occur, as most of your officers get asked this question on a regular basis. As the evening wore on, we talked about flying sites, the magazine, flying sites, insurance, frequencies, flying sites, competition rules, instruction programs, flying sites, awards programs, club recognition, safety programs, etc, etc. Each subject bounced around the question of which group it would benefit most, and very often, which group would it hurt. As subjects would come up, we would drift into ideas which would benefit one group of members or another. After following that trail off into oblivion, someone would invariably bring up the need to do more for the average member, and the discussion would restart in a different direction.
President's Perspective: Growth: Whose responsibility is it?
The value of any activity will be appraised, in large part, by the rate at which it is growing or declining. There is a saying in Business 101 that goes something like, "a business is either growing, or it is dying." In model aviation, unlike most other industries, the industry has traditionally relied on the organization of its customers for most of the promotion and growth of the activity. There are exceptions where the industry did some promotional work, but even most of that involved the industry helping modelers run programs. The industry looked to AMA, and the AMA looked to its clubs, and the clubs looked to its members. This has historically worked very well; aeromodeling grew into the sport/hobby it is today. In fact, it may have worked too well.
