RCU Forums - View Single Post - Drones or Model Aircraft Do Not Pose Major Risk to NAS
Old 03-23-2016 | 05:04 PM
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Chris P. Bacon
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Originally Posted by franklin_m
Lost initial field, concrete runway built by 60's era pattern flier farm owner in middle of one of his corn fields, when land sold to new owner who had no interest in strangers on his property.

Moved to second field, crop duster airport, and lost that one when adjacent property owner complained to airport owner about noise

I was deputy commander of base out west. I worked with my PWO to identify a chunk of land to use (we had an existing dirt bike club), was willing to run Navy wickets with regional HQ to get club permission, and even write SOPs to integrate RC Ops with existing full scale TACAIR ops. One thing I could not do was spend any Navy money on project. Called AMA flying field development guy (not current one) to get grant for DG and supplies - had volunteer heavy equipment operators willing to do work - equipment rentals funded by club members. AMA refused unless club was open to all AMA members, whether had a DoD ID card or not. Due to AT/FP policy, was unable to grant access to anyone without DoD ID. So project stopped in tracks. Club members were mostly retired on fixed income w/o financial means to do much more than rent dozers etc (or borrow from local farmers). Bottom line, AMA guy told me on the phone the answer was no. Even if I put in a formal request the answer would be no.

Chrispy likes to make a big deal out of the fact that I wasn't stupid enough to spend all the time writing up a grant application they'd already told me would be denied.
It's not only that he couldn't complete the 8-12 short answer questions on the application which only took me about 10 minutes to complete. It's that the maximum available funding was only $300 or so. Thus, even if his grant application was rejected, he still could have reached out to the Girl Scouts for advice running a bake sale to raise the money the flying site grant would have provided. Loosing a flying site for $300? Unbelievable.