On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 10:31:17AM -0700, Mike Smith wrote: | You are way out of line here. I know you don't represent the | sentiment and perception of the vast majority of the folks on this | list. It seems you aren't even a pilot since you didn't talk about | the airspace regs and minimum elevation above ground in congested | areas. Noisy polluting things you say.
Lots of R/C glider pilots say that about `slimers'. I figured he was making fun of that. | So, if you were just sitting back just throwing out fodder for the | list to read and respond to, congratulations you hit the nerve. Not | a real difficult one to identify though. There's two sides to every issue. So far, we've only seen Daryl's, and it's likely that's all we're going to ever see. But that's OK ... | Please fly safe and be a responsible RC pilot. A nonchalant attitude | like yours could be very detrimental to our little hobby. I didn't see any evidence of a nonchalant attitude in Martin's post. It looked like a more balanced discussion of the issue than others. I don't think anybody here has ever suggested that you should ever do anything that puts a plane with a pilot in it in danger (be it a hangglider, utlralight, single engine, etc.) but at some point we DO have to share the sky. I've never flown near an airport, but the HCAM field here in Austin has a Cessena owner who flies out of his ranch less than a mile away. He flies near the field from time to time, and we bring our planes down or at least close in to the field when we see him, and he probably avoids us too. (Bergstrom airport is perhaps 10 miles away, so it's not a big concern.) At the ASF field in Pflugerville (another AMA club field, I might add), about three months ago a jet fighter of some sort came flying overhead, probably around 700 feet up. I was there by myself, and believe I was about 1000 feet up -- he actually came rather close to flying directly _under_ my plane -- and there wasn't a thing I could do about it, flying a slow 2.5m glider. In fact, I probably made it worse by initially diving when I saw him come into view (I was assuming he was higher than me at the time.) The whole thing lasted only a few seconds ... I don't know if he saw my plane or not. The sky is big, so the odds of a collision are small, but even so, it's a risk. Really, the only sure-fire way of avoiding one is to not fly, or at least to never fly over 200 feet or so, and even that's not sure-fire. At Zilker park, downtown Austin, I see low flying helicopters on a relatively regular basis. Low as they are, they're usually higher than I am, but they're often well under 1000 feet. Really, if I personally have this many calls for concern, and I don't even fly near any airports, I can't be the only one. The FAA advisory regarding R/C planes is here -- http://www.modelaircraft.org/PDF-files/540-C.pdf and it says to let you the airport know if you're flying within 3 miles of it. In Daryl's case, the hill appears to be about one or two miles away (if I'm looking at the right place on the map -- there's a few possible hills that I see) so that would certainly qualify. It seems unlikely that the glider guy had notified the tower, as the tower would have notified Daryl, but it's possible he did. (Personally, I don't see any good reasons for Daryl not to notify the tower about anything that is seen as a potential danger, R/C or not.) Apparantly the slope flier _was_ giving right of way to Daryl (as he absolutely should -- only a fool or a lawyer would take the general FAA rule that `gliders have right of way over powered aircraft' and try to apply it to a R/C glider), and apparantly Daryl wasn't in the `normal' approach vector so maybe the glider pilot was far enough out of the normal approach to be `avoiding flying in the porximity of full scale aircraft'. I don't know, I don't fly there. I'm sure Daryl will say it's not. Certainly, the distance from the usual flight pattern is very small -- perhaps half a mile? Is that far enough for slope flying (where you probably don't go very far away or very high?) Probably not. (Nobody seems to take the 400 foot limitation in the advisory seriously, especially glider pilots, but judging from the reactions I've seen here, perhaps people _should_ be taking it more seriously. My experience tells me that the odds of a collision with a full scale airplane, extremely remote as they are since I don't fly near any airports, go way up if I'm over 400 feet.) And I doubt it's just me. I guess the real question is this -- how far away do people think is far enough? The AMA doesn't have any authority here (unless you're a member, of course), but their safety code does say this -- 5. I will not fly my model aircraft higher than approximately 400 feet above ground level, when within three (3) miles of an airport without notifying the airport operator. I will yield the right-of-way and avoid flying in the proximity of full-scale aircraft, utilizing a spotter when appropriate. which seems reasonable, though `proximity' is somewhat vague. (And on an unrelated note, the FAA and AMA are working on revamping that 24 year old FAA advisory. At least that's what Dave Brown said in his Model Aviation column recently as he backpedaled (or clarified, depending on how you saw it) on the 700 or 1000 foot rule he was talking about a few months before.) Though I do disagree with Martin on one thing -- I certainly do believe that an R/C plane could seriously damage a full scale plane. And jet turbines are fragile things -- if a bird can immediately destroy one, a big glow engine or a carbon fiber re-enforced wing certainly will. As for birdstrikes, many of our planes are somewhat bigger than most birds, and http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=birdstrike will find you all sorts of scary pictures of what happens after one hits one of those. (Though to be fair, if pictures are taken and end up labeled `birdstrike', odds are that the plane landed relatively safely.) (And on this idea, http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68937,00.html is interesting reading ... `snarge'.) | My father was a pilot in Alaska, and we always had a small plane. Hey, small world -- my dad too. (Though in his case, he's still up there and still flying. It was one reason I was sad to move from Alaska to Texas ... I did enjoy flying with dad.) -- Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED] RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
