How to lose a flying site
View from HQ by Dave Mathewson, AMA Executive Director
davem@modelaircraft.org
A couple of months ago, I wrote in my column about how being an asset in your community can help acquire or save a flying site. A member wrote me and suggested a good topic for a column might be how to lose a flying site. I thought the suggestion made sense.
AMA receives regular calls from clubs that are on the verge of losing a site because of conflicts with neighbors. The issues are nearly always either noise complaints or complaints about models flying over neighbors’ property.
A number of years ago, we had a complaint from a neighbor of the club I belonged to when I lived in New York. The individual lived virtually across the street from the field. His complaint was “You guys come out for your couple hours of fun and go home. I have to listen to your fun all day long.” He had a point.
Instead of ignoring the complaint, the club took actions to mitigate it. We created a sound rule, restricted flying to certain times—especially during early morning hours on weekends—and put a cap on membership. The neighbor saw that the club was trying to be good a neighbor and was satisfied.
The club could have ignored our neighbor, but I guarantee that if we had done that, the neighbor would have enlisted the support of other nearby residents, they would have gone to the town with their complaints, and the field would have been lost.
AMA has created a document that can help your club abate sound issues. It can be found at www.modelaircraft.org/files/927.pdf.
Another problem when flying sites are in jeopardy is flying over your neighbor’s property. First, doing so can be incredibly unsafe if you’re flying over unprotected people and property. It’s a violation of the AMA Safety Code. When a model goes down, and we all know they do, the safety issue is reduced markedly because we fly in a footprint that precludes flying outside the boundaries of the field.
Maybe more importantly is that flying over someone else’s property could be considered trespassing. See AMA document www.modelaircraft.org/files/2012revisedmodelfliersandneighborsdoc.pdf.
The law is abundantly clear. As modelers, we simply do not have the right to fly over someone else’s property without permission. And doing so agitates neighbors and emboldens them to do whatever they can do to shut the field down. In these instances, it’s almost certain that a club will lose its field.
Many clubs also feel that, because the field might have been in existence long before new housing was developed, that the club has “grandfather” rights. In many cases this is true. However, even so, if we cannot get along with our neighbors then the future will not bode well for us. Local town councils and legislatures are not oblivious to complaints coming from their constituents. They will react to the pressure and that might not always turn out well for us.
There are also times when a club prevails, but it’s akin to winning a battle and possibly losing the war. If the neighbors aren’t successful in having a site shut down, their anger will not subside. The club will always be faced with angry neighbors and the field will always be at risk.
So, what’s the moral of the story here? The models we fly today are bigger, faster, and in some cases louder than in the past. We need to remember this. Flying sites are becoming more difficult to find. Urban crawl continues to encompass open land, especially in the more populated parts of the country. If a club loses a flying site and can’t find a new one, chances are the club will not survive for long.
The best thing we can do is to put ourselves in our neighbors’ shoes. Ask yourselves, if you were a neighbor, would you be comfortable living alongside your club’s flying site? If the answer is no, be proactive and do something about it before it’s too late.
See you next time . . .
