ORIGINAL: Tom Antlfinger
2. If you are an AMA member, you are required to abide by AMA rules for your PERSONAL liability insurance to be in effect.......if you have an accident leading to a liability claim, it makes no difference whether the accident was at the Muncie HQ Field or in a remote part of Death Valley.......the AMA's Insurance Company, as your insurer, will be named in the suit.....if an AMA member was flying without a waiver or in violation of any other rule, the AMA and it's Insurance company will make every attempt to disqualify the violating member's insurance and get the AMA removed from the suit.....but that will often require years of expensive litigation in a typical liability suit.....but..... if they lose, all rule-abiding AMA members lose, as, inevitably, it will make our insurance more expensive and more difficult to obtain.....
Then the above is a perfectly good reason why the AMA should stop coming up with stupid and unnecessary rules. A lot of people fly at non-AMA chartered fields in order to get some freedom from the "You mustn't fly at 200.01+ mph" or "you mustn't fly at 55.01+ lb AUW"
turbine-only restrictions. If the AMA were more interested in inclusion than exclusion, and treating all segments of the hobby equally fairly, then there would be less reason for people to sometimes choose to fly outside of the AMA's influence, and consequently more influence would be available for the things that really do matter.
3. The only way the AMA is ever going to stop members from violating the rules is to have a clear cut policy of revocation of AMA membership when turbine waiver rules are flagrantly violated. None currently exists, unfortunately.....until such Draconian rules are instituted, we will continue to have AMA Members touting their inalienable ability to do whatever they damn please at fictitious "Non-AMA" fields.....
Since the AMA already claimed to have clearly defined policies for revoking waivers, yet steadfastly refuses to actually do anything when other AMA waiver holders, TCDs etc file written complaints that meet the AMA's guidelines for requesting a waiver revocation... I don't see the above ever happening (at least not while the current
mismanagement team is in place).
4. If an individual has an insatiable, deep-rooted desire to fly turbines while violating one or more AMA rules, I would strongly encourage them to surrender their AMA membership and then go fly at their "Non-AMA" fields.....that way the "Group and Several Liability" legal concept can't be invoked against the AMA, it's insurers, and it's rule-abiding members.....
I can tell you for sure that that aint gonna happen, especially while there are so many hypocrites around ... people who go out of their way to publicly defend the current AMA rules while privately admitting that they have no intention of obeying those same rules.
Gordon