Would you allow people to fly your plane remotely via a web service for a fee?

Fortunately, there are a lot of guys who don't always look for the "easy way" to do everything. Ambitious people acquire new flying sites, coordinate events, raise funds for improvements, etc. It wouldn't be too great of a leap to do something different and talk to a local insurance agent about coverage for a flying club and its members. Model airplanes are a named risk covered by standard insurance policies for homeowners all over the USA. Our insurance companies are already covering us for flying model planes.

I'd really like to work on this issue some time in the future. I'm going to be moving to a new area soon, and I don't know if I'll be looking for a place to fly with other people, or if I'll just be able to walk out my back door to fly. If it becomes an issue for me I'll be very interested in exploring my options for insurance. Your "easy" verification costs $58 for every member, which is a lot of money when you add it all up. How much does a club pay on top of that for the privilege of being an AMA chartered club?

Reply to
Robert Reynolds
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The hidden answer to this is not insurance for the individual pilot, rather insurance for the club. What is not obvious in that is the insurance FOR the club is provided TO THE LANDOWNER (as part of the club charter fee) and in effect even if an AMA member violates every single safety rule we have. In short, 'we' create environments that attract spectators and risk takers by the nature of our hobby. Some of those risk takers welcome much more risk than you or I and the landowner needs the coverage even if you don't. If the landowners were not insured, I suspect that the existence of 99% of our 2400+- clubs would be ended.

While you may not like the cost, the management, or the stipulations involved in AMA membership it should be clear that there is lasting real value. I know that I am seriously displeased with at least 2 of the aforementioned items, but I still think the AMA is the absolute best thing going and needs our support and occasional kick in the pants.

Jim Branaum AMA 1428

Reply to
Six_O'Clock_High

Yes, that's the point. All of us who own homes, which is probably most of us, are already covered by our homeowners policies. The idea is to talk to a real insurance agent about getting a liability policy for a flying site, to cover the owner of the property. Presumably the biggest risk is that a passing motorist would be hit by a plane and sue the guy who allowed the flying, rather than sue the individual pilot. Realistically, the greatest danger is assumed by those involved with RC at the flying site, but any landowner would want to be covered as well.

If it's the best thing going it's only because it's the ONLY thing going. It couldn't hurt to get something else going. Competition is a good thing. Sport Flyers Association put together an insurance package for cheap. It was just as easy as AMA, and it didn't cost as much to be a member. Their biggest mistake was to tie the whole thing together in one unit that was susceptible to lawsuits. Why don't people think outside the box and do things locally? Your club could have its own site with its own insurance policy. An AMA chartered club with 20 members pays over $1200 yearly in dues. Surely this wouldn't be hard to beat.

Reply to
Robert Reynolds

SNIP

Sorry, on that one point you are wrong. It turns out that no matter how you look at it, the AMA did right. It offends me when anyone I do business with sells my information to another and the SFA not only wanted that information from the AMA, they wanted it for free and thought they had a right to it and tried to get the courts to buy into that fallacy. That turned out to have been one of the worst investments the SFA could have ever made because they lost and then they lost again by not being ready or able to pay the costs of the litigation they started. When I heard what the original action was over, I began to change my views. After that my main beef with the second action was that the AMA spent lots of my dues dollars on lawyer fees. Then I found out what it was for and I began to realize that the AMA took what any reasonable business man would call the proper fiduciary action to protect the membership from potential fraud and then to recover the costs of that action.

The biggest mistake SFA made was to sue the AMA in an attempt to get the courts to order our organization to release our names and contact information so they could market to us. They lost that suit just as they lost the suit AMA filed to recover the legal costs taken from the membership to pay for the first lawsuit. Please read that again carefully because there are several implied "gotcha's " in it that slip under the radar screen when we talk about stupid things the AMA has done and assume this was one. In this particular case I have had to eat shoe leather more than once because I had the same opinion as almost everyone else.

Reply to
Six_O'Clock_High

Wow, I never heard that story. That was a stupid thing for SFA to do. They were in the right place at the right time to introduce some competition into the market place, and they should have just left it at that.

Reply to
Robert Reynolds

It doesn't gybe with even AMA's side of of the story, as told in the pages of MA. SFA 'won' the suit that started the mess when AMA's insurer settled with them for an amount of $$ that was small enough that AMA called it a 'pyrrhic victory.' AMA then sued SFA, which by then was just a name as it had been sold to a new owner, and won a default judgment because the new owner did not show up in court to defend. AMA was awarded lawyer's fees by the court in that case. They ran up a sizable bill for additional lawyer's fees in an attempt to collect on that judgment. We members paid for AMA's lawsuit and fruitlessl attempts to collect. If there was a win of any kind, it was to kill off AMA's competition.

Abel

Reply to
Abel Pranger

Search this group using the search argument of SFA. There are post over the last 10 years that will educate you. Those that do not know history are destined to repeat it.

Reply to
IFLYJ3

I doubt that I would ever repeat that history, by starting a national organization. I prefer to do things on a local level.

By the way, I'm not so sure that's what actually happened. I just belatedly realized that I didn't want to repeat history by going over the same argument about the SFA-AMA lawsuit.

Reply to
Robert Reynolds

I have some more hard data for you.

This last weekend I didn't really have anything else to do, so I built an... uh... "airplane" for testing. 4'x3' foam sheet, 2mm, taped a few spare CF rods to it to give it the illusion of stability, taped control surfaces on and all that... basically "put enough engine on it and it'll fly" kinda thing.

Used a few bits and pieces of work equipment to rig a wireless cam, satellite internet transponder (on a reserved channel) and a bit of a D/A controller hack which I fervently hope my teachers will never see, they'd rotate at 100rpm in their graves.

Long story short: The plane was built to fly S-L-O-W, and it did. At a resolution of 640x480, using 768kBit/s video stream and experimenting with another 128kBit/s audio stream the feed quality was tolerable at best. Turns still blurred too much, and the latency was the killer. I tried a few different codecs with pretty much the same result.

I truly doubt that it's possible for any joe schmoe to fly an r/c plane that way. Adding automatic stabilizing and maybe some sort of intelligent in-flight oversteering protection might help, but truthfully: anyone who is able to fly an r/c plane that way will have a much more satisfying experience flying a real r/c plane. Considering you can get dirt cheap halfway decent RTFs nowadays... nah, really can't see anyone shelling out cash for flying a quite boring "internet r/c sim".

Main points:

- The sense of motion is rather disappointing, particularly in the air. At landing and takeoff it's kinda exciting. Once in the air the sense is that everything happens in slow motion.

- Considering my controller endpoint was, albeit over the 'net, just off the runway, I'm not sure it'd be possible to practice for the delayed reaction without that direct comparison available at first.

- I did fly the plane successfully with only the remote, but... the lag is awful. At one point I had a hiccup (lost packets I think) and I almost smashed the plane into the ground. Mind, that's a plane going maybe 30mph tops and lumbering through the air like a grandma on sedatives.

- Almost 1MBit bandwidth upstream is, in my eyes, excessive. Yet the video quality was not nearly sufficient. For decent visuals it'd need significantly higher resolution and thus bandwidth. The catch is simple: Better compression = more lag. Lower compression = less information per second, thus crappy picture.

You may have some ingenious new technology up your sleeve, who knows. But with current technology the idea is DOA.

Sorry. Jen

Reply to
Jennifer Smith

Thank you for realizing that!

Reply to
IFLYJ3

I like my hobby associations to be the same way that I like my government to be - minimal. None of this, "We know what's best for you" baloney.

I've been in clubs (R/C) where once there was a Board of Directors (henceforth referred to as the BoD), the BoD went on to endow itself with ever more expanding powers. At one time we had to vote on expelling an errant member after the proscribed number of warnings. After the BoD came into existence, they took it upon themselves to remove whomever they pleased from the club's roster without so much as mentioning it at the monthly club meetings. You can imagine how the BoD evolved over time. I finally quit one of the clubs that I helped start because of this behavior and went on elsewhere to fly. With SS gear becoming popular along with lighter electric powered models, do not be surprised if we see the number of R/C flying clubs and even our national organization decline in size.

I'm not saying that the AMA has gone quite this far, but only because WE, the membership, would not let them. I'm not pointing a finger at any current or past serving members - just at human nature.

Ed Cregger

Reply to
Ed Cregger

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