RC clubs: a postive part of the community
By Tony Stillman
Happy New Year! I hope you and your families had a wonderful holiday.
This month, I want to tell you about the Gateway RC Club in Jacksonville, Florida. Club member Steve Arrington provided me with a complete article that will be featured in a future issue of Model Aviation. The reason that I am giving you this introductory portion is to show how important AMA clubs can be in their community.
The Gateway club decided to be proactive and provide education to its community. The event was a tremendous success, and the aftermath has seen the club contacted by city officials to sit in on round-table discussions and be the local authority on model aviation and multirotor (drone) activity and how it can be done safely.
On Saturday, August 29, 2015, the Gateway Radio Control Club hosted a free class, “Flying Drones, Multirotor, and Rotor Aircraft Safely, with Updates of New FAA Rules,” at Gateway Field in the Lannie Road City Park. When this class concept was presented to club members, they were told that we could expect between three and 20 attendees, as is usually the case for any new venture. After a lot of hard work, 26 people (from three counties and one from Georgia) participated. With better-than-expected media coverage, this was a win for our community, our club, and hobby.
How did this class come to be? Last year I offered to help our club vice president, Gerry Mizelle, put on a few educational programs. Gerry, who served Gateway RC Club in every capacity, was fighting a major illness, and was unable to continue his work before he passed. When asked to serve as the new vice president, I wanted to move forward with programs for education. What should I start with?
What would attract people to RC flying and also be perceived as positive by our community?
Our club field uses land that is part of the Jacksonville City Park system and will eventually be taken over for expansion of the Jacksonville National Cemetery with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The city agreement with the VA will include constructing a new RC field for us in roughly eight or 10 years, so maintaining a great relationship with the city government is important to our club’s continued success. We also share maintenance of our field with the City Parks and Recreation Department.
This educational program should provide for those relationships to be continually noticed in a positive way. This July, a new group of city council members took office. The council members with knowledge about Gateway RC Club were no longer in office, so we needed to establish contact with many new city leaders. Any educational program that would be open to the public and prospective new members to the hobby must also be able to gather some media attention, which meant that it needed to be timely.
After talks with members, and seeing the ever-increasing pace of media stories about drones being used or flown inappropriately, and wanting to attract younger persons, we settled on an introductory class focused on drones and the FAA changes affecting the hobby.
Simply hearing a couple of people talk about RC flying might be educational, but would not be too exciting, so we set this up as a mini-training session, hoping to have a little something for anyone attending, including visitors.
We developed a four-part program:
- A verbal presentation with some displays (to run no more than 90 minutes).
- Demonstration flights by expert RC pilots (covering most aircraft types).
- Time on flight simulator programs.
- Actual time flying with an instructor.
There is much more to come in the full article, but I wanted to give you a sneak peek.
When AMA was contacted in 2007 by the FAA to sit in on a discussion group about sUAS in the National Air Space, we had no idea this journey would go down so many twisted and turning roads. AMA’s Government and Regulatory Affairs Representative Rich Hanson has spent thousands of hours in meetings and attending conferences since the beginning of this process, and there is no end in sight.
Rich even testified before Congress and did a terrific job of representing AMA and model aviation. Many additional hours have been spent by AMA staff and Executive Director Dave Mathewson in support of this effort. More than a $1 million has been spent by AMA as well.
One of our biggest efforts has been to show the FAA that AMA members and clubs are operating safely, and can be an asset in the promotion and training of the many new enthusiasts who have jumped into model aviation with multirotors. Our clubs and members are the experts in the field. They know how to fly safely and have fun doing it! We can and should be included as part of the solution.
The Gateway RC Club is a good example of how AMA clubs can be a vital part of the community! I can’t think of a better way to protect your flying site and your hobby than by actions such as this.
Gateway RC Club members are currently working to provide us with the syllabus and documents that they used in this class, which we hope to share with AMA clubs that would like to do something similar in the future. I will let clubs know when these resources become available.
I hope that you will see the value in what Gateway RC did, and think about doing the same with your club and community. AMA is here to help you do that. If you are interested, contact me for assistance!
Until next time … enjoy the new year and start thinking about your indoor models!
