Originally Posted by
mr_matt
I added the bold
I HOPE this happens, meaning I hope they don't goof around at the end and not see what is coming and we lose the whole organization, even lose the insurance. I have been trying to tell them this for years, even as the Park Flyer program was theorized. I told them to prepare for a future of <80,000 members ( I meant paying, heck that might be all we have now). And I was ignored and ridiculed.
To me the drone situation (while different with the side show of federal regulations), is really just Park Flyer/Park Pilot redux. You did not need an AMA club type flying site to do park flyers. You need AMA even less for mutirotor (not withstanding racing). And the only real value the AMA offers is field insurance (as much as that pains them to hear).
So yes, I hear the number of people signed up with the feds (drone registration) is now north of 770,000......but we still are suffering membership declines. And if they are saying it publicly, it is 10X worse in (private) reality.
We are facing a dire problem in Muncie. It is a true bureaucracy that needs to shrink itself by 75-90% and just provide the insurance program. That is maybe 4 people in a small office.
Who will lead the AMA to that end? Not the guys that are there now. They will fight it tooth and nail.
Dang....you hit the nail on the head! I'm engaged with TonyS on another site. He wants a pat on the back for providing a contact list from conferences. He's frustrated that he's not received more members talking to him about this. I told him "well, that's a complete failure of AMA's internal communication." I have to wonder how may people we're paying for such crummy internal communications?
Additionally, I told him that gathering a list of names of cities etc. that might be interested in a field is an activity, not a result. Why? Because AMA HQ & EC still expect the members to do all the heavy lifting.
Meanwhile, they continue plowing big dollars into "Taj-Muncie" and spend quite a bit more on EC travel for their quarterly conclave than they give in field grants. And there's the EVP who wants to put MORE money toward recruiting drone members -- despite two years of effort without result. I think they call that putting good money after bad.
These three actions alone send a huge signal to me as a member. I'm paying to support the bureaucracy. Back in the military, we used to call that a "Self Licking Ice Cream Cone" -- and it wasn't a compliment. That's what AMA HQ and the EC has become.
Meanwhile, you've got two folks in Government affairs, one of whom is so knowledgeable about aviation that he says the 107 material is really hard. Wow. That's who's telling people what they can and cannot do? It's like having a plumber tell you how to do brain surgery. And what is that sort of "expertise" costing us? Serve up another "SLICC."