Safety Comes First!
THE DOPESHEET, newsletter of the Terre Haute, IN RC Club (editor, Don May) had the following to say in a column titled Safe Flying: "Obviously nobody will aim his five- or six-pound, 70 mph projectile at your head intentionally, but consider: a solder joint breaks, an elevator flutters and rips off, a servo motor hits a dead spot, or someone else turns on a transmitter without having the frequency pin; the best pilot in the world can do nothing before the inevitable happens. The only way to assure that the inevitable happens in a safe spot is to never allow the model to fly over innocent heads."
Safety Comes First!
JUDGING by our mail during the last few weeks, our column in the October issue sparked a lot of interest. We also trod on some toes with our comments on paints containing polyisocyanates. We stand accused of using scare tactics in our efforts to alert modelers to the hazards of some of the materials that they may use in their pursuit of the ultimate finish. An article was submitted to Model Aviation from Jack Kinney with a request to publish it to illustrate "the other side of the coin," so to speak. Since we have no axe to grind, here it is in its entirety.
Safety Comes First!
WOULD YOU BELIEVE that Styrofoam may be hazardous to your health? Before we describe why, perhaps we should define what we mean by Styrofoam. This is a registered trademark of the Dow Chemical Company and, to the best of our knowledge, is not the foam material used to manufacture coffee cups and ready-to-fly model aircraft. The material we are talking about is usually sold in large sheets of varying thickness and is very often used for home insulation, but may also be purchased by modelers to make foam wing cores. When sold in sheet form, it usually has a paper covering on each side with the Styrofoam name (together with the name of the manufacturer) printed on it.
Safety Comes First!
LAST MONTH we mentioned getting our knuckles rapped by a reader for allowing an unsafe practice to be depicted in the form of a cartoon in the November '81 issue (page 126). Well, when the December issue arrived in our mailbox and we spotted the Futaba advertisement on page 2, we braced ourselves for the deluge. Sure enough, we have received more mail about this advertisement than on any single topic since we started writing this column some two years ago!
Safety Comes First!
WE HAD not planned any further discussion on the subject of cross-country flying of RC model aircraft. However, we received several more letters on this subject during the past month, and we note in the February 1982 issue of Model Aviation that the VP for District IV, Chuck Foreman, has a request for comments on the future of Trans-Am Rallies. Since we appear to be alone in questioning the safety of cross-country flying, we thought that you should have the benefit of seeing a letter that "presents the other side of the coin." This letter comes from Rick Helmke, who flew in the 1981 Trans-Am with a team from the Auburn Planesmen RC Club:
