I don't want to sound churlish, but some of the very high speed jet turbine models, scare me rigid. I for one would feel a lot safer if such things were banned or at least not flown anywhere near me! At least c/l speed is flown behind substantial chain link enclosures!
I agree that these are a lot more dangerous to be flying around on a 750mw transmitter. But I don't think the size and speed make it much more dangerous than a typical pattern plane. They are all potentially lethal, even the 40-size ARF trainers.
And I have seen, in general, much more responsible behavior from turbine pilots. They seem to have some respect for the activity and not anybody can just get them and fly them, and the expense weeds out a lot of the casual pilots.
The guys I worry about are the duffers and the weekend buy-and-fly types, particularly those that fly unaffiliated with a club - and there are A LOT of them. I would guess, with minimal data, that probably 3/4 of the people flying R/C do it outside the AMA club system. I have seen more stuff that just astonished me in my brief encounters with these guys than I have ever seen at real club flying. Like the guys who flew from the access road next to highway 101 near our site. They were taking off and landing right in the middle of the road, and flying over the highway. 101 is a major highway, and just north of the San Jose airport the road is always packed. These guys were taking off and landing on an open street less than 50 feet from the side of the road. I was over there for about 5 minutes trying to get them to stop and in that time, only a chain-link fence kept them from crashing into the highway.
Another example - some guys flying a 40-sized ARF trainer in the park near my house. This is a tiny little park, with a baseball field and some tennis courts, and not much room for anything else. I used to test HLG's there but it was too small even for that. They were flying this thing on a Sunday afternoon in the packed park. Oh, and bordering the park on all sides, dense residential housing. It was halfway from the park to my house, which is about *half a mile* away from the park. If that thing goes down, it's hitting something expensive - or someone. They were taking off and landing over the tennis court and the *active little-league game*. I go down there, say, hey, guys, this is crazy. "Oh, it's OK, I have insurance" (which is what they always say). I guess waving your AMA card over someone's lifeless body will make them spring back to life. Not to mention that in any of these cases that insurance is worth warm rat sh*t - safety code violations all over the place.
I have dozens of similar tales, and they almost all involve *casual R/C fliers*. If you follow the AMA safety code the risk is minimal, but that's very rare. Most R/C "duffers" I have seen have no compunction about flying over and around people and get hostile if you tell them to stop. There's not a lot an organization like the AMA can do to self-police this *if people don't care*. So, someone else is going to police it - even though pretty much the same issue arose at the beginning of the "gas" age, and it didn't work then, either.
Brett
Topic: Will Control-Line again reign Supreme? (Read 10255 times)