2020. A year of change to say the least. A year that shook the very foundation of our planet to its core. A global pandemic ensued, quarantines followed, businesses shut down, and talks of a new normal shrouded us all with uncertainty.
Also, toilet paper hoarding became a thing. Who knew?
March 11, 2020 is a date that will be remembered by many as the dawn of the “new normal”, the date everything seemed to change. As for AMA members and modelers around the world, this date seemed to come even earlier with the FAA’s announcement of Remote ID NPRM.
The community banded together in ways never before seen by the FAA. Modelers from everywhere shared their thoughts and concerns in record breaking numbers, more than 55,000 to be exact. That’s the amount of comments, many by AMA members, in response to the new rule imposed by the FAA.
For comparison, that’s more than double the amount of comments received by the FAA on any other post. Ever.
Just one display of the passion our membership has for the hobby. Hats off to you!
Combating Remote ID kept us busy the first couple months, and as the year continued to unfold we were presented with new challenges. Meeting the needs of our members has always been our top priority and we were not going to allow this to shift. So our staff got to work, some from the basement, others in garages, anything we could do to slow the spread of the virus while continuing to bring value to our members.
Businesses started to shut down as we did our best to flatten the curve. We knew one of the first items on our new agenda was to help members in difficult situations find opportunities. Our team scrambled to come up with a tool to help our members find opportunities. The AMA Career Center was created to connect talent with opportunity. We felt it was the very least we could do.
In a year fraught with negatives it becomes easy to overlook the positives, but one positive that we at the AMA took from this year was how we banded together. Humans helping humans. Members helping members. This sense of community shined through brightest when we needed it most. That’s what inspired us to create our new logo and tagline; Your Passion. Your Hobby. One Community.
“I think often people think of AMA, they may have images of the museum or the headquarters building or our great flying site here in Muncie, Indiana, but AMA is bigger than that. AMA is about our members, our clubs, our officers, our events. That’s the real heart and soul of AMA.” – Chad Budreau
If you’ve made it this far and haven’t already listened to the latest episode of the AMA Podcast, you can do so here. Our Executive Director, Chad Budreau, goes further into detail on AMA initiatives in this Special 2020 Year in Review episode.
Check out some of the other cool stuff we’ve been doing this year!
Model Aviation Live with Jay Smith
The things important to me are: 1. The liability insurance provided for members 2. Representation to the government and preventing the FAA (and others) from interfering with our hobby of flying models. Unfortunately, AMA has not done a powerful enough job of this as there is still a significant threat to ridiculously limit our flying even in places where we are not near professional or civilian flying lanes and the threat of an expensive and unwarranted ID system being imposed on us. 3. The AMA EXPO shows that were in Southern California were a peak experience for me whenever I could go and now there are very sadly gone. 4. Events like the Nationals are interesting, but way to expensive to attend far from home. There should be more local similar events in all local areas.
What are the latest rules/regulation for quadcopters/model airplanes??
Latest UAS rules and regulations can be found at
https://www.faa.gov/uas/recreational_fliers/
Where can I get definitive, up to dat info about the Remote ID issue?
visit our gov page for the latest updates. modelaircraft.org/gov