Re: The Problems with Indoor FF
Don D. you make valid points and Kagan has countered a few very well. Like John said Indoor will never go away, someone somewhere will find a Williams book in their library or download a plan from a website sometime and fly it at their local gym.. Don S. is correct about entering a new venue and having the respect and courtesy for the participants inside.. When you take your kids to the Zoo, you yell at them when they put their hands thru the bars of the tiger cage, just like you yell at them when they run around someone's table at an indoor event. People are looking at us weird, so what? We're recruiting the weird ones.. just don't give me shit for calling the indoor community weird.
Don S. You're one of the exclusive-leaning old farts that yelled at me when I asked you why you were selling your things, not participating in contests and what had happened to your indoorfreeflight website, you exploded; shut down indoor groups here on yahoo and blamed me for everything.. You were a legend to me, an exclusive indoor modeler.. I was only curious why your participation was dwindling.. and you took it out on every one by shutting the list down; and then this Diddler here; yeah you Mark, banned me for like a year because you thought I was a threat to the group! WTF
What surprises me the most is the lack of new young participants coming out of Wright Stuff the past five years even though I either read or heard about indoor mentors helping kids all over the country..
The problem with indoor didn't come up for another 30 or so posts after this discussion started; it's money.. I once called out the indoor community as cheap, hey I didn't mean everyone, but Don S. gave me the same shit for it.. your winders and your torque meters, and your hundreds of dollars on precious indoor wood.. it's bullshit; you buy the tools once and have them for the rest of your life. On average how much do you spend on indoor materials per year? Balsa, rubber, wire, film? $100, $200? How come we don't have T-shirts, no one will buy them. How come Kent wasn't run until 8pm this year, because no one wanted to shell out the extra 10 or 20 dollars to compensate the costs? The materials are cheap, contests are cheap, the only thing that costs money is the travel part. But if you wanna go anywhere, you gotta pay; that's life. Otherwise you'll be like my grandmother who hasn't been anywhere and lived at home most of her life; but to defend my poor grandmother she's not cheap just thinks that every activity is dangerous.. I digress.
Unlike Formula1 racing or F1B flying, anyone can buy it and race it or fly it so long as they have the money.. and if they don't destroy it they can usually sell it back at a similar cost. This goes along with the builder of the model/competitor rule.. Who will pay for the amount of time it takes to build an indoor model? No one.. Nothing in indoor ff can be marketed, cost vs time never breaks down to a good profit. Even if you build a poor F1B wing or an RC DLG wing, you can still sell it for a reasonable amount, you can't sell an F1D wing.. All I'm saying is that there is a market for F1B models because people are willing to pay, there's no market in F1D.. why? Maybe people aren't willing to pay.
If cost is an issue; Lakehurst is only $20 per year, that means you can come every single weekend for a year; yet barely anyone shows up.. Cmon it's the largest available indoor site in the world! What the hell is $20 nowadays? Two fast food meals? When I came to the states in 1993, I was a small kid, but I knew the value of $100.. that same $100 today is nothing. You know it and I know it, and if $100 is alot to you, you're cheap. Go to the grocery store, fill up your car with gas; BAM! There goes $100!
At the end of the day; Indoor is not worth the time and effort.. unless you're trying to prove something to yourself.. the fact that you can do it.
I think that's what kept me going in the beginning, not a shiny medal, grand prize, or paper certificate with my name spelled wrong.. I didn't have a mentor or local flying buddy that made the hobby fun/social and worthwhile.
With that said, we are an odd group of people looking for other odd people.. it's hard to find us. You can't spread indoor into the general public as they are 'normal'? 'typical'? These are the people that look at us weird when we yell at them for walking too fast! That's why I find it hard to believe that there is no new comers out of Wright Stuff.. not every kid in high school wants to compete academically against another science nerd!
Indoor is difficult and it requires skill, there is nothing beginner about it; if you wanna do it you're gonna have to roll up your sleeves and get dirty! Otherwise you can fold a paper airplane and call it free flight. That's why people choose to do one thing over another; "here kid chuck this glider".. Patience isn't a beginner character trait, it's the key ingredient in indoor.
Don't get your panties up in a twist over this,
Max Zaluska
Received on Wed Jun 03 2009 - 12:40:04 CEST
This archive was generated by Yannick on Sat Dec 14 2019 - 19:13:45 CET