Great Idea!
Your hired.
Thanks for you words.
AL
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Bennett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "RCSE Soaring" <soaring@airage.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 12:18 PM
Subject: [RCSE] Some Thoughts on AMA
All the comments I have read on this exchange over the last two days bring
to mind some ideas that have been boiling in my mind for a couple of years
regarding the Academy of Model Aeronautics and how it is organized.
First, a little background regarding me. I have been a model airplane
hobbyist for forty-eight years. My father and his brother were modelers
before me. Like many others in the RC soaring branch of the hobby, I have
built and flown FF, CL, RC "gas", and electric models over the years, but
have been pretty much exclusive to RC soaring for the last fifteen years.
I
fly with the Soaring League of North Texas (SLNT) in the Dallas/ Ft Worth
area and am an AMA contest director. I think you could say I am an active
contest flyer.
Holding thirty-one club contests a year, SLNT may be the most active
competition club in the country. There are thirteen unlimited sailplane
contests including two separate contest days of the Texas National
Tournament (TNT) each year. We will complete a total of fifteen
handlaunch/DLG contests this year. There were also three RES events
including one at TNT. I have flown in all but about three of these events
over the past five or six years and have been CD of all the handlaunch
events for the last six years. Attendance at these competitions has ranged
from about eight to forty-five entrants with the average being between
fifteen and twenty per event. Except for this year, SLNT has obtained AMA
sanctions for about fourteen of these contests each year for at least as
many years as I have been involved.
My issue with the organization of AMA is that AMA is governed by an
executive council made up of elected regional vice presidents. These
officers are elected by AMA members within a geographic area regardless of
their interest in the various disciplines of the hobby. For the most part
geographical areas are irrelevent to the issues affecting AMA. It is clear
to me that this system is doing a poor job of representing and dealing
with
the needs of a large portion of the hobby, including soaring. Model
aviation has evolved into a diverse set of disciplines with many AMA
members
specializing in just one or a small subset of these disciplines. There do
not seem to be many pylon racers who fly sailplanes, helicopters, indoor
free flight, and control line carrier as well. How effectively are they
represented by their regional vice president?
I believe that this system should be replaced by a realignment of the
governing board along the lines of special interest groups representing
the
modeling disciplines. Each special interest group should function as a
separate division of the organization with its own funding and staff. The
executive council should be made up of the heads of these groups with some
form of proportional representation based on the number of members in each
group. Members having interests in multiple special interest groups should
be given the opportunity to join multiple groups paying dues reflecting
these multiple interests.
The current organization of AMA is a legacy of the state of the sport in
the
1930's and 1940's when the academy was formed. Just making a model fly
was
a major achievement in those days. With rare exceptions, free flight was
the
only choice. Competition was primarily segmented along the lines of the
age
of the flyer and how the free flight models were powered. Junior, Senior,
and Open flyers flew glider, rubber, or gas free flight models in AMA
events. The interests of modelers in Virginia were different from those
in
California and representation was needed primarily to address those
regional
interests.
Today, age group competition is almost non-existent. Flyers travel the
whole country to fly in AMA events within their special interests. There
are at least eight different segments of RC soaring each having their own
needs regarding safety, insurance, flying sites, air space, competition
regulation, radio frequency control, and launch equipment issues. These
segments include electric, flat land thermal, slope, dynamic, hand launch,
aero-tow, F3J, and F3B. AMA's regional vice presidents, for the most part,
have no awareness let alone informed positions regarding any of these
segments or their specialized issues and yet they govern our sport.
The AMA contest sanction packages I have received recently have each had
several pages of information and a waiver form regarding the use of jet
turbine engines in my sailplane contests. AMA says we should not fly
gliders
higher than 400 feet AGL, but those same packages also included forms for
measuring and filing for altitude records for models flying up to several
thousand feet high. The safety column in Model Aviation has a lot of
information about people cutting their fingers on propellers, but nothing
about a dynamic soarer traveling at speeds so fast that if its wing were
to
hit you in the neck it would remove your head without knocking you off
your
feet (300+ MPH).
The soaring community needs AMA to address these issues and represent
soaring's needs more than it needs to represent all the flyers from region
7
versus those from region 8. We need representatives that know that a hand
launch glider doesn't use a jet turbine engine. We need to not be paying
insurance premiums for helicopters and fifty-pound, multi-engine meat
grinders when we fly ten ounce floaters.
Just some thoughts. I am putting on my flame-proof suit now.
Tim Bennett
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