Our contributor is a private individual who happens to fly his turbine powered models at a personal airfield. Your concern is interesting (and initial part of the evaluation process), however, the editorial staff found the contributing author in question to be the most relevant and well written article that best adhered to the purpose of the article-to introduce and explain the modern turbine powerplant. If his article is correct and serves the purpose of helping the membership understand the Jet special interest and get more involved and well as supportive, then I fail to see a serious greivance.
Thank you for your explanation, however it is very weak, and does not speak well for the AMA headquarters staff.
Within our turbine community is a constellation of more experienced jet flyers than your contributor, including AMA Hall of Fame members that are active participants in the hobby industry.
Many of these individuals have forgotton more than your contibutor has learned with his short excursion into jets, and many of these industry members are capable of far better explanations of the fine points of turbine modeling. Sorry you elected to publish an article written by a friend that does not represent our special interest group.
Harley – I wholeheartedly agree with your basic premise that the AMA mag should really be showcasing cases where people are following the AMA reg's rather than those who are not … though this is far from the first case of them doing so. I've seen rants in the AMA mag about "no touching the aircraft in flight" on one page, while another page glorifies someone doing just the same, etc, etc.
With that said, based on your reply I do think you may be misunderstanding part of what this AMA guy is saying. He is indicating that this seems to be the best written article
that they have received on the topic, and you are replying about there being far better qualified people. So, the obvious question (and this is not rhetorical) is : have those far better qualified people submitted articles to the AMA mag ? If so, have they put the effort into an article that this non-AMA guy supposedly has, to have an article that can appeal to the masses rather than just to fellow jet-jocks ? (Note – I have not read the article)
I think the subtext in the AMA's reply is that if we are not marketing ourselves in a way that can appeal to the membership as a whole, then we have ourselves to blame for that oversight, and I think that is a valid observation. However, it would be nice if the mag folks would consider passing such prospective articles past the relevant SIGs for a quick sanity check to make sure they are not advertising activities that violate the AMA safety reg's etc.
Gordon