Originally posted by nascarjoe
It still amazes me why modelers keep asking these questions. Fact is, as Pogo, the great philosopher said, "We have met the enemy, and they is us." We all, to some degree, suffer from the favorite fishing hole syndrome. I've belonged to and/or visited many RC flying clubs over the years, but have just recently, thanks to a most amazing RC flight programmer, (instructor just doesn't do this guy's teaching ability justice), learned to fly and fly quite well.
In literally all of these clubs, beginners are for the most part, given only token help. So-called "instructors" only go through the motions of providing training and after talking to many veteran fliers, I've discovered that literally no one talks about their hobby to relatives, friend, neighbors, people they work with...no one. Which may be the reason our sport is so unknown.
The impression I get is that if a club member gets someone interested, they will have to provide training. Those who teach absolutely don't want to further inconvenience themselves by bringing in more newbies, and those who don't teach, may have been told by those who do, in no uncertain terms, not to volunteer someone else's flying time and whoever brings people into the hobby will do the teaching. Imagine if a 100 member club did the right thing and trained everyone to fly solo, talk about incrediably crowded flight lines.
If clubs really wanted to get more people into the hobby, why don't all clubs provide instruction 4 or more days per week, instead of the one or two days, (if at all) some clubs offer?
Suppose clubs asked government officials to come to your club's training night or a meeting. First thing he would notice would be there would nothing but retirement age members there. He or she might ask that if this is such a great hobby/sport, why is there only 25 members at a meeting and only 15 active members and only 2 instructors and that the roster never seems to increase?
Also, why after its 60 years of existance, there are only 170,000 AMA members? And of those 170,00, there are only 20,000 kids in a US population of 281,000,000? How many voters from clubs would there be in a given location?
I'm sure many, many exuses will arise, but chances are it will not impress the government official when it comes time to asking for more flying fields.
nascarjoe
Hmm, where to start.
Nascarjoe, please do not take anything I say as a personal remark but as an observation based on what 'shows'. Before starting I have to say that Pogo was right on target, even here.
I am afraid your point of view is/has been poorly colored by the crowd you fly around and with because I know that what you have described happens, just not everywhere! In fact what you described as normal seems to be less than acceptable in the places I have been, visited, and am familiar with.
In my club instruction is given whenever by who ever. I admit that there are few instructors, but better few willing to fly someone else's plane than lots of newbie crashes by unprepared instructor wanna be's. An example of that is I have a student that everyone who instructs has washed their hands of, he may solo around the first of the year. In almost every club I have ever been a part of, getting new members was always a goal and teaching them was part of the community effort. That makes me think you are seeing a local oddity rather than a serious problem nationally, but I could be wrong.
As for club meetings, it is a reasonably rare case when much over 20 to 30 percent of the membership shows up. I guess that is good for clubs with membership over 100 since meeting places tend to get expensive as more people need to be seated. The issue is not how many people go to the meeting, but how many (percentage wise) are having what they define as fun.
The better way many have found is to get the local politicians involved with a visit to the flying field on a weekend before asking for things. That gets them 'educated' to what our "needs" are and what kind of things we do. Those visits also set the tone of things so that potential complaints are viewed a little less enthusiastically against us.
One of the important things everyone seems to miss is that old folks vote more than kids. That means showing your politician a flight line of old folks on buddy box has more impact that a bunch of kids flying with instructors. The latter is ballyhooed as the great AMA way, but we all know that sooner or later they will discover girls. The politicians are not as dumb as we insist because they know that also. The politician also sees kids with R/C models as spoiled rich brats and that point of view does not help us at all.
My opinion, but I am willing to be educated into a different one.