Yes, but …… PAMPA should be active in, and participate in, the vetting, communicating, and refining of PA rules. My opinion at least. Who better to provide advice and council to AMA than the Special Interest Group? True, the only voting occurs with the “AMA” PA contest board, but ….. “they is us”.
Back in ‘90 something, when the safety thong rule got re-instated, I lobbied against it to no avail. What I found out was that most of the PAMPA membership didn’t know how the AMA rules change process worked. At that time, I made a terrible mistake in fairly publicly blaming the controlline contest board chairman of acting without any feedback from PAMPA. I was wrong. PAMPA was involved.
The interesting thing I found was that PAMPA was ask by the controlline contest board for input into this rules change. As it turned out all district reps were queried for input on the safety thong rule. Out of all districts I think there were 8 votes. 7 for and 1 against. Unfortunately, I don’t think these reps carried the words about the rules out well enough to the members. There wasn’t discussion or communication in SN about the proposal. And poof, there it was. We got the safety thong back. (I not here to argue the need or not for the thong …. that horse is out of the barn)
The un-intended consequences of this proposal was the need for emergency rules changes to eliminate the “starting and takeoff in one minute” bonus points. No biggie points-wise, but people were rushing to get the engine started and cutting themselves on running engines trying to get to the handle to get the safety thong attached in time. (Actually a couple of quite visible prop accidents that really probably wern't that related to the thong prompted the emergency action)
So, add a column to the spreadsheet for plane weight, unique pulltest required, and line size. Also, start building new pulltest machines.