Originally Posted by
astrohog
You missed my point.....COMPLETELY.
- AMA embraces "park flyers" when they fear they will lose members, or capitalize on this "new" segment of enthusiasts (or a combination of both). I have been on record for many years opposing this decision for two reasons; 1. The AMA has absolutely no way to monitor activities that occur in the public arena, away from established club fields. 2. Because of that (AND the close proximity and visibility to the general public) it is these folks that have raised the eyebrows of the media, municipalities, FAA, the uninformed, uptight public, etc, etc, causing the restrictions and regulations we are now seeing.
The irony I was referring to earlier (that seemed to escape you) is that the very group that the AMA aggressively marketed to and created a whole new type of membership for, are now being denied to fly in the parks and public places they are accustomed to and the AMA doesn't seem to be present to advocate for them.
The WORST part, is that while the AMA was courting and spending all of it's time and resources on the very segment of the hobby that is causing these restrictions and regulations, it has completely forgotten about the "traditional" modelers. Rember them? The ones that CREATED the AMA to begin with???
Before you dig your heels in and say it is not this segment causing the problems, I will provide my perspective: If ALL flying activities were to remain on established club fields, we ABSOLUTELY WOULD NOT BE SEEING THE LEGISLATION AND REGULATION THAT WE SEE TODAY. PERIOD.
Regards,
Astro
Hi Astro ,
I will be the first to admit when I was wrong , and in the beginning I was wrong about the Park Pilot Program . My mistaken notion was that yes indeed the AMA EC was trying to bolster membership numbers , and that no harm other than the wasted money of trying to attract a non existent group would come of it . I say non existent because my thought was that the EC saw the numbers of park flyer sized planes being sold and thought there was this huge untapped resource of what could be paying members if only a membership category were there to cater to them , when in reality it was us , already AMA members , who were buying the all the parkies for a bit of "grab and go" flying . Myself and CombatPigg had noted that of the hundreds of thousands of park flyer planes being sold why weren't there people out there flying in every open space in town ? , and being just 30 miles outside of Boston I'd figure to see at least some . But no , despite getting out quite often for an old guy I never saw folks flying parkies in any field I drove by other than my fellow clubmates and myself flying them on our club field . But then came #336 and the whole "CBO" farce where our organization attempted a "power grab" by positioning itself as the only way to hobby fly anything RC and it was then that I got the picture , it was no longer about protecting any kinds of "traditional" aircraft modeling and had fully become all about protecting the AMA and if we traditionalists (who built the AMA in the first place) had to end up under the bus' wheels in the effort well so be it . This was further proven by the whole romancing the drone effort , an effort that again has gone no where . To anyone who wants to answer I ask ; "Where ARE the thousands of new AMA members that were supposed to be signed up due to the "drone friendly" program that was initiated ? Shouldn't we have leapt from our 179K members up to at least 250K or so if the effort was successful ? So the parkflyers for the most part ARE us and the drone flyers for the most part don't want us (and our "fun killing" safety code) and so still we sit at less than 200K members with a lot of $$$$ spent for what I see as no real return on the "investment" .....
Originally Posted by
Sport_Pilot
Sorry but I simply do not agree.
Hi Sport ,
No problem buddy , no one ever said we all have to agree on everything , and were the world totally 100% agreeable there wouldn't be 50 different flavors of Ice Cream at Guifford's Ice Cream shop if everybody only liked Vanilla
