Tome, ts reflects a HUGE FAILURE by a bunch of entities! The AMA, SIGs, Manufacturers and Clubs have all failed to let those interested in controline flying know that is still alive and even active!
Instead, poor slobs buy mementos on the bay.....
What we have here is a lack of communication.
Rich,
I think that may be a bit too critical. No question we could all do a better job of advertising our activities but, we need to remember, this is a hobby for the vast majority of us. Taking free time away from our modeling activities to do promotion is seldom a choice we want to take.
Frankly, one of the things that makes me think that actively persuing a more aggressive course of action might be less than satisfying is what happens everytime we go fly in today's world.
A little comparison. When I was a kid, my brother and I would jump on our bikes and pedal madly at the sound of a model engine from one of the parks/school grounds where we knew flyers sometimes showed up. We weren't the only ones. It was quite common to have people pull over in cars or bikes or from walking by and show great interest in what was taking place. The fact that we could actually fly in parks or school grounds in residential areas certainly had something to do with that. The attractive nuisance thing, I suppose.
Nowadays, we fly in a couple of places that are open to spectators. The Napa flying field is in a public park in a very up scale city (not in a residential part of it, however), and our "rented" site in the Mission College parking lot gets considerable drive by activity as well as people coming to the school for "other activities" such as band practice, baseball, etc. etc.
The plain truth is that - attractive nuisance or not -- 99 out of 100 (at least) people who come by not only don't stop, watch or ask questions, but don't even glance in the direction of the activity. I've no clue exactly why our "unusual" and "not particularly quiet" activity doesn't act like a magnet, but it clearly doesn't. I could make all the usual guesses about all the "options" for spare time that flood the marketplace in a veritable waterfall of pinpointed commerce ($$$$$) but doing so would only be my guess which is no better than anybody elses.
Once again, it is worth recognizing the incredible efforts of Alameda, CA's Bill Osborne, the late champion of CL training activity who for decades spent huge amounts of his life into exposing young people to control line activities. He built literally hundreds of flying saucers, begged, borrowed or otherwise obtained cox engines for all of them and invited hundreds and hundreds of young people (and their parents) to the field named in his honor near the Oakland Int'l airport. Once again, Bill did this for decades and there was always club activity at the same field to help interested young people in continuing.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no currently activite CL modeler in the Bay Area whose interest came about from all the hard work (and personal $$$$ resources) Bill put into bringing them the opportunity to participate.
I know that, for us who've been addicted for a lifetime, such ennui on the part of young people seems hard to believe. I'm just not convinced dedicated efforts to implore interest is likely to bear fruit. I mean, you gotta remember that today we still have a large part of the people who originally became enamored of control line. Sure, we've lost a lot of us, but we still have hundreds who've done this stuff since the '50s. It seemed like a lot of people at the time, I suppose, but really, several hundreds or even a few thousand of the millions of Americans who've come and gone or are still with us in the last six decades is an incredibly small demographic. Maybe we're just destined to find our future in the dribbles with which it has really been occurring since the post war/post Lingbergh aviation "boom".
Has your experience in the more populous Northeast been demonstrably better?
Ted
Topic: Profit (Read 4573 times)