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Old 04-06-2009 | 07:50 PM
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Glacier Girl
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From: Lakeland, FL
Default RE: AMA or Private?

Plumber, as someone in a similar situation, I own my own flying field, and something you may also want to look into is forming a corporation, to help insulate yourself from liability.
It's what I did. My field is open to anyone, AMA or not. Our club The Badius Boys Flying Club Inc." is a 501 non profit corporation, to help protect the members also.

And what ever you decide, as the others have mentioned, get the best lawyer on the subject you can find. I'm now living in Florida, but the field is in Pennsylvania, you won't believe some of the things you have to consider in ownership, private especially.

Note I said above that my field is open to anyone, not just our club members. In PA at least, if you post no trespassing signs on your property, to try and keep out the riff- raff, you've opened the door to a lawsuit if somebody actually trespasses, and gets hurt somehow.

In PA putting up "NO TRESPASSING" signs are saying that you as a land owner are acknowledging that there are known hazardous conditions somewhere on your land.

Not putting them up eliminates somebody from suing you when they happen to get hurt trespassing.

Our club is a little different from any other club out there. It's made up of posters here on RCU, from across the US, Canada, OZ land, Japan, and a few other places.

We physically meet once a year at the field for a week+. Handling club and corp business along with the usual stuff. We also own our own website, that allows us to communicate and handle any situations that come up during the year.

Lastly all of our members know about our insurance coverage: " You get hurt or worse, we take the Kubota and bury your butt, divvy up your stuff and deny ever knowing you" So far no complaints from the ones we've buried.

Sorry just some humor to relieve all the seriousness, but you do need to be serious about covering your butt, somebody is always going to try and blame/sue you. Just remember the McDonald's coffee suit.