I'm not worried about park flyers because I doubt that those things would ever get into the flight path of a rider-scale a/c, and if it did the damage would likely amount to a sparrow strike. I 'spose if you took it to the nth degree a 1:1 might suffer damage from running over a park flyer, but not likely very much.

What I'm worried about is that FAA doesn't know diddly about model aviation in general except that we exist and that our models look very much to the untrained eye like something a terrorist might employ. Worse, in their ignorance, FAA would likely make no distinction between park flyers and my giant models, lumping them into the same undesireable class of nuisance objects to be severely controlled.

What bothers me even more is Dave Brown spouting max altitude recommendations off the top of his myopic head. 1000' (if I recall his statement correctly) won't cut it for the glider guiders, and his off-the-cuff 'recommendation' sure looks to me like yet another situation where heretofore acceptable record flight attempts will soon fall into the 'you need a waiver to do that' category.

Letting paranoia run rampant, it's not too difficult to envision a future where model aviation waivers for whatever purpose are under the purview of FAA, you can't get a waiver from FAA if you don't have an FAA license, and I betcha you can see where that thought leads.

In the end, AMA members have brought this on themselves by ignoring the election process and letting political animals stay on the EC for decades, and those political animals didn't do anything at all to plan for the future. Granted, no one was concerned with FAA prior to 9/11/01, but it's been _four years_ and STILL nothing has been done.

Tony and Dave and Andy are the newbies on the EC, but they've not had time to make a dent in the good ol' boy mindset that plagues the EC.

I'm worried that the horse is long gone and AMA leaders don't even know we have a barn.