... but why do you compare a safe 3D flyer to an unsafe sport pilot, when you could just as easily compare a safe sport flier to an unsafe 3D pilot ?? (We have all of the above in the SCCMAS BTW. I won't mention names! ;-).

Suggesting that pilots of one discipline are safer than pilots of another is a sure way to achieve nothing but animosity, IMO. (All have a mixture of safe and unsafe pilots.) I think that a much more productive approach is for each discipline to try to find out what the most common causes of gripes against them is, and try to make whatever accomodations they feel are reasonable. The minor policing that you do of your own group will be much easier to handle than if groups pit themselves against each other and you end up with club officers having to draw up a bunch of new rules to govern your activities.

For instance, the most common gripe about heli pilots in our club is about them flying from the infield instead of at a pilot station where they can hear people calling landings; for jets the biggest gripe I hear is about making reverse-pattern fly-bys right down the runway; for sport planes the biggest gripe is about t-34's racing against the pattern while others are trying to do landings; for 3D the biggest gripe I hear is about pilots who insist on hovering their aircraft close in in front of some other pilot instead of doing it in front of themselves , and so on. In each of these cases there is an extremey simple way of addressing the annoyance without any significant reduction in the fun you can have, and nipping the minor problems in the bud before they escalate.

So - isn't it better to make such simple changes (and communicate calmly about changes you might want to suggest to others), than to increase friction between disciplines by seeming to suggest that one is safer than the other ?

Regs,
Gordon