Safety Comes First
Is our hobby safe? Never mix Control Line flying and electric power cables! Comments concerning standardizing RC transmitter designs and using stooges to hold models. More. QUESTION: How safe is our hobby? A few issues back, this column discussed the safety record of our hobby and compared it to other leisure activities. A recent letter from Joe Wagner included additional statistics on the comparative safety of model flying versus hunting which you may find interesting. Joe stated: "Last week I received a professional inquiry about the safety of model airplane flying from a man completely unfamiliar with our hobby/sport. In order to give him a comparison with a spare-time activity that he does know something about, I did some fast research into hunting's safety record. I acquired some interesting data:
Safety Comes First
ELECTRIFYING experience: If any readers have the mistaken belief that a prop being turned by an electric motor is less hazardous than one being turned by an internal combustion engine, take a look at the photo accompanying this column. That's the hand of Bob Kopski, contributing editor of MA's "RC Electrics" column, that you see. I can assure you that the original color photo, which Bob enclosed with a recent letter, has more of an impact (pun intended)! Following is Bob's explanation of how it all happened. "The enclosed photo pretty much shows that one needs to respect Electric as well as `most everything else. This mishap was the result of two situations: an intermittent `economy' connector, and some rather embarrassingly poor judgement on my part.
Safety Comes First
Hazards in painting; accelerators for CyA glues; electrical hazards. Some bugs have legs! What about renegade RC fliers? HAZARDS of painting: Jim Moynihan of Williamsville, NY is a pilot of both full-scale and model airplanes. Jim sent me a page from the May 1990 issue of the EAA Experimenter magazine which reported the death of a full-scale pilot due to breathing the fumes from the paint he was using. The paint was DuPont Imron, a multicomponent polyurethane paint containing polyisocyanates, which some modelers use to achieve "that perfect finish." The account of the death in EAA Experimenter is as follows: "If you've been following Dick Cavin's 'Tin Bender' column the past few months, you're aware that he's been discussing painting metal aircraft, and that he recently included a caution about the dangers of working with paints, etc. "Unfortunately, the aerobatic community has recently suffered a real-life reminder of how dangerous paint chemicals can be. Scott Finnigan, the chief aerobatics instructor for American Winds (an aerobatics school in Vero Beach, FL), died from complications of inhaling paint fumes. Finnigan was apparently working in a small paint booth, largely unventilated, and without protective breathing equipment, using Imron. This paint is quite lethal, and the fumes apparently attacked his lungs causing incurable damage, resulting in his death.
Safety Comes First
SPONTANEOUS IGNITION. A prerequisite for starting a glow engine is a battery to light the glow plug, right? For the most part the answer is-yes, but I continue to receive a steady trickle of letters from modelers who have had glow engines start unexpectedly without a battery connected to the glow plug. Some of these letters have asked how this can happen, so I thought that a discussion on this topic might be beneficial to readers. A recent letter from Harold Christy (Kannapolis, NC) described an incident that required a visit to the emergency room of the local hospital to fix his engine-starting finger. Harold wrote:
Safety Comes First
RC FREQUENCY SCANNERS. A couple of months ago, I received a letter from Ben Trapnell, a modeler from Corpus Christi, TX, who also happens to be an (full-scale) Aviation Safety Officer. Ben stated that he was interested in purchasing a frequency monitor that would scan all of the frequencies we are currently permitted to use. However, he had only seen frequency monitors, such as used to be produced by World Engines and Airtronics, that scanned the older frequencies. His question to me was, "Is there a new one on the market which will monitor the new frequencies and not set one back a few thousand bucks?"
