Patrick's comments:
The Academy of Model Aeronautics membership is purportedly down and under 90K. Their self-inflicted demise is based on hubris and naked greed. Those in charge "leadership" thought they had a chance to be ASTM International junior and charge every hobbyist in the country $75/year to use their safety guidelines. The once esteemed academy has let the RC hobby community and the country down. Besides shooting the country in the innovation foot, it has fallen short of its role as the feeder pipeline for the domestic aerospace ecosystem. The model RC hobby is/was once as American as apple pie, and it served as the conduit to an aviation innovation pipeline that is/was the envy of the world. That pipeline exposed youth to the excitement and rewards of the process of engineering, building, mathematics, and physics that they could then go and fly.
Put that all together and in some circles, it might be called workforce development. Who is going to build, maintain, and crew the billions of dollars the government is spending on drone dominance?
— Patrick Egan
From Clarence Ragland:
Patrick,
The AMA has watched its membership plummet from 170,000 to 89,000, shedding millions in revenue with no structural end in sight. Traditional club onboarding is broken, and defensive regulatory postures won't save them.
The turnaround won't come from top-down bureaucracy; it requires a viral, grassroots growth engine: The Kinesthetic Instruction Technique (KIT) paired with a "Teaching the Teachers" framework.
How it works:
Immediate Multiplication: KIT allows a beginner to be trained rapidly, instantly empowering them to turn around and train the next person on an RC simulator. It creates an exponential onboarding loop instead of relying on bottlenecked weekend instructors.
Reclaiming the Hobby: By aggressively steering new participants into fixed-wing aeromodelling through rapid, tactile success, we naturally pull enthusiasts away from the multi-rotor and FPV Wild West that has caused the AMA so many regulatory and airspace headaches.
Safety comes from numbers, and numbers come from a frictionless, tactile entry point. I'd like to show you how a scalable rollout can stop the bleeding for legacy aeromodelling.
Best regards,
Clarence C Ragland