BOM change

[Joseph Patterson]

I'm just a little fish in the midst of all you bigger and more knowledgable fish and simply say that Mr.Roland's analogy is absolutely perfect. It is about tradition and all the things Mr. Rowland stated. A long line of champions paid the price through much dedication, ingenuity, very hard work, and rigidly adhering to long established rules to accomplish the goal of being the best. Then Brett Buck plainly and bluntly tells it like it is, "You build the damn plane." You two fellas "made my day" with your views on this issue.
  Doug 

[Brett Buck]

Brett: Have you been to a hobby shop in the past 10 years? These
days in the world of model airplanes an ARF/ARC IS the average kit.
An ARF/ARC is a kit. It is different than what was a kit 30+ years ago,
but it is a kit.

    And my fondest hope is that *we prevent C/L into turning into the nightmare that sport R/C has become". Forget stunt for a minute, and forget the fact that what you are talking about has nothing to do with R/C competition and thus bears absolutely not at all on what we are talking about

  What you see as the forward face of RC is a group of eternal beginners and duffers who care no more about RC than they would about playing frisbee in the back yard. To them, it's just another easy way to kill a Sunday afternoon. they buy one ARF trainer or park flier after another, fly it until they crash, and get another. They don't have any dedication, and the market you are talking about depends entirely on continually creating new guys, because after 6 months or so, the participants get bored with it, and move on to something else. So the entire industry is servicing the rank beginner crowd, and are required to continually market to that crowd. So you see an "Airplane Store" approach.

   That is as diametrically opposed to NATs championship competition in C/L stunt as could possibly be imagined. It's absolutely anathema to what we are doing, and it's exactly what I am trying to *prevent* - because taken to the same extreme, it utterly and completely destroys one of the last healthy events *in all of modeling*. It's already greatly diminished R/C competition, just look at the numbers for a current NATs R/C entrants compared to the mid-70s (before ARFS'R'US approach took over). You speculate that such a change would be an improvement, I think otherwise, but there's no getting around the fact that it would completely change the event.

BTW, everyone is focusing on the "average kit" part, and ignoring the "prefabrication" part. The entire idea is to limit the prefabrication. ARFs and ARCs *are not kits*, but the problem is that the level of prefabrication is excessive and that is the part that is the real bone of contention.

     Brett

[Clint Ormosen]

     What you see as the forward face of RC is a group of eternal beginners and duffers who care no more about RC than they would about playing frisbee in the back yard. To them, it's just another easy way to kill a Sunday afternoon. they buy one ARF trainer or park flier after another, fly it until they crash, and get another. They don't have any dedication, and the market you are talking about depends entirely on continually creating new guys, because after 6 months or so, the participants get bored with it, and move on to something else. So the entire industry is servicing the rank beginner crowd, and are required to continually market to that crowd. So you see an "Airplane Store" approach.

This is exactly the conversation I had with the LHS. They state that at least 2/3 of their customers are first timers, only interested in an ARF, and then maybe buy a second one a week later. After that, they're not to be seen in the store ever again. The other 1/3 of customers are long time builder/fliers.