ORIGINAL: jonkoppisch
With flying sites being being restricted or clubs losing them, rather than building a 10 million dollar museum (I may be wrong on the $), how about putting the money back into the membership and try to purchase land in each state for a regional site. In turn that would attract more members to the hobby and make a large permanent site. We would be talking about $200,000 per state to buy some land in a semi rural area for a flying site and more important I believe would be that a majority of the membership would actually get to use or at least visit it.. $200,000 would buy a NICE rural flying site!!!! Not saying the museum is bad, but I've seen a lot of museums that are nice for under 1 million...
Actually . . . 200 grand won't buy much of a flying site anywhere in Georgia, and I'm betting it wouldn't buy much of a flying site anywhere within driving range of Mobile, either.
Atlanta RC came close to losing their site, and the only reason the site still operates is that the landowner deeded the land to Dekalb County for parks and recreation use and took the tax write-off. Otherwise, the site was up for sale for a cool 2 mil. Think AMA could spend that kind of money for a North Georgia regional flying site and get away with it ?
I mean, people are STILL ranting about the Muncie purchase, and that was a pretty inexpensive acquisition at the time.
Any land North of the gnat line here in Georgia goes for something like 40k per acre, so your 200 grand would likely get AMA a regional flying site of between 5 and maybe 10 acres.
That's not a lot of room for a regional flying site.
The plain truth is that AMA (WE) simply don't spend the kind of money on membership dues which would afford AMA (US) to buy regional flying sites. We ain't got the bucks and we likely never will.
It gets much worse in the Northeastern US, where for example open land is simply not available - they're not making that stuff anymore, y'know.
Personally, I'd love to have a regional flying site somewhere within say, 6 hours driving time. I'd go there every other weekend and I'd spend the weekend ridding myself of model fuel. I also don't think it will ever happen because as a tiny little niche hobby, our shekel pile is not very high at all.