5487.... you missed part of my point. The club and instructor are always available. Anyone that is irritated by the notion that they should practice their hobby in a safe environment shouldn't be in the hobby. If one chooses not to be inconvenienced by safety, again, I have issues with that. If you can't get yourself to a safe location to participate in hobby "X", then hobby "X" is probably not an option for you.

Granted, an experienced pilot knows a club/instructor is not required to fly safely. However, a beginner pilot doesn't even know how to fly, so how would they know what a safe location would be? The next best thing would be to try to explain to them the flying area requirements, but I think we can probably find many examples here on RCU where beginners have grossly underestimated the size of the space required, the damage a plane can cause, etc.

40-60 sized trainers are extremely common. Many, myself included, learned on such a craft. Any experienced pilot would consider them kitty cats, but they can still do quite a bit of damage. Your high end motorcycle analogy really doesn’t apply. That would be like a newbie getting a turbine, or a 40% gasser… totally different. The point here is what we consider a “standard” trainer has the potential to do a lot of damage, so safety is important.

As for farm boys, I come from a farm boy state just north of you. Sure, farm boys learned to shoot safely… way out in BFE, with pa looking over their shoulder until they were reasonably safe. The same should be done with any R/C plane of any consequence. Now I’ll give you that if you live in BFE, and you have access to a couple of square miles of land with permission to fly over, go for it. But to everyone else, find a club and the guy named pa.

My major concern here is the potential for unsafe flying to impact the hobby, either locally or at a larger scale, for all of us. While safety issues can have many sources, I think it is hard to deny that beginners present a large risk. Don’t interpret this as I don’t want beginners, I personally spearheaded several programs at my club aimed at obtaining and retaining new pilots/members. But the risk needs to be managed. I like to fly. I fly high powered and potentially very dangerous planes. I’d hate to see local government restrict R/C plane because some beginner who just bought a plane at the LSH flew off a gravel road just outside of town without permission and killed someone’s cow, or whatever.