Originally Posted by
MTIPilot
I firmly believe the president of the AMA has no problem forsaking traditional model aircraft for autonomous drones. He believes the AMA will grow with new membership of drone operators and the members who are traditional R/C pilots are now secondary. He and the AMA have launched a "Drones are Good" program to defend drone flying but never took equal effort to explain to the FAA the vast difference between autonomous drones and traditional model aircraft that operate line of sight. The AMA has "reacted" to the ridiculous senate proposals but never took the proper initiatives to prevent this. Instead, they embraced autonomous drones at the expense of the freedoms for traditional model aircraft flyers.
It's interesting that on hand, people have huge expectations for what the AMA should do, and should have done, but then go right to saying how small and powerless the operation is. I mean, which is it? The president of the AMA is by all rights a "traditional" modeler....as were the prior ones as well. It's curious to hear someone say he'd basically sell out the whole hobby for a small (but growing) segment of the hobby, and a pretty new one as well. I wonder if that's what folks said of the AMA presidents in the past when Nitro and Gas and Helis came into popularity. Be interested to hear what specific initiatives the ama should have taken to prevent a huge federal agency from doing what they want. Other than "ban drones/MR" from the AMA, in two years I've yet to see one legitimate meaningful suggestion put out there. And we now know that banning anything would have been useless.