President’s Perspective - 2001/01
Dave Brown, AMA President
One of the greatest assets this sport — or hobby, if you prefer — is the diversity of its participants. We are all members of an organization dedicated to the sport/hobby we share, yet our interests vary widely. The secret is for all of us to celebrate that diversity and to work together to improve the image of aeromodelling in general. If we simply look at everything we do from the narrow perspective of how it benefits us individually, we will surely fail to survive as a group.
Recently I spent an evening “solving the problems of the world” with a couple of other members of the Executive Council, and, as very often happens, the discussion drifted toward what AMA does, or could do, or should do, for its average members. It’s natural for this discussion to occur, as most of your officers get asked this question on a regular basis.
As the evening wore on, we covered many topics:
- flying sites
- the magazine
- insurance
- frequencies
- competition rules
- instruction programs
- awards programs
- club recognition
- safety programs
Each subject bounced around the question of which group it would benefit most, and very often which group it might hurt. As topics came up, we drifted into ideas that would benefit one group of members or another. After following that trail off into oblivion, someone would invariably bring up the need to do more for the average member, and the discussion would restart in a different direction.
In the last 18 years I have taken part in this same discussion literally hundreds of times, and the result and direction is almost always the same. We identify something we might do to benefit some and realize that it will only benefit a handful. Eventually, someone points out that it is midnight, and we all give it up for the night.
I had been thinking about our latest bull session when the thought occurred to me that we have been doing our darndest to try to do things for the average AMA member — when such a member doesn't exist.
If you try to produce a demographic “average” you can come up with a statistical member: someone of a certain age, with some improbable number of children (like 2.39), some number of years of education, a certain income, and a certain amount spent on the hobby each year. But that statistical average isn't very significant to those of us trying to do more for our members.
Try averaging 10 Radio Control (RC) Pattern fliers, 2 Wakefield fliers, 3 Giant Scalers, 4 Control Line (CL) Combat fliers, and 10 RC Sunday fliers of widely varying expertise — what do you get? How does that average change if you throw in a person who flies nothing but autogiros or a couple of ornithopter buffs?
Guess what? There is no such thing as an average AMA member.
Now, if I could only find out what that “average” AMA member would have us do.
As of this writing, I am off to the RC Aerobatics World Championships in Ireland.
'Til next month.
Dave Brown AMA President dbrown@dbproducts.com
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
