Meeting Minutes: 2011-02-12

Meeting: 2/12/11 at 9:00 AM, Tom Larkin’s home

Attendees for the business portion of the meeting: Paul Gordon, Mike Forney, Brian Cabebe, DJ Molny, Tom Edwards, Tom Larkin, Bob Freeman

Contest Planning Updates

Spring contest:

Greeley is our first choice, currently waiting on approval from landowners overdue (was expected 2/1). Drop dead date is 2/25 for landowners and hanger support confirmation. Plan is to revert to Sterling if we can’t get confirmation by 2/25. Need 8 weeks for contest waiver and adding two or three for buffer. No other contests are scheduled nearby that weekend.

Fall contest:

Candidate sites are Ft. Morgan and Sterling pending location of spring contest. If Greeley is the spring location, then preference is Sterling for the fall. If Sterling is the spring location, then we'll focus on Ft Morgan. There are issues with Ft. Morgan, the biggest issue is hanger space. The farmer that had been an oppositionist has apparently passed on and his land has been purchased by the city. This will make it easier to get box approvals. Hangar space is another concern, and needs further investigation. Ft. Morgan has a lot of funding for growth and have big plans but none of that would be helpful this year.

Waivers

After a significant delay and much effort, Bob submitted mailed practice waivers to the Denver FSDO for Ft. Morgan and Sterling. The Environmental Information Document was or is in the process of being dropped as a submission requirement. Since Bob had it mostly done, he finished the EIDs and included them with the waiver requests. The Fish and Wildlife commission and state historical society both responded with a statement of no impact, and Bob included their letters with the application. Based on conversations with Travis Wood of the Denver FSDO, we should not expect approval until 8 or more weeks have passed. Target date then is mid April at best. For future reference, based on his observation of the Hypoxia Fest last year, Kyle Scott seems ok with putting the box right over the runway at Ft. Morgan.

Roster activity / communication

DJ reports that there are 18 names on the roster for whom we do not have valid email addresses. Although we will make an effort to rectify this, we probably don’t need to expend incredible efforts to connect with past members that clearly are not that motivated to stay in touch. Stop after a reasonable effort. Tom Cochran is phone only. Jack Wilhite’s info needs to be updated. Hierarchy for communication is email, cell phone and website.

Member benefits / membership discussion:

Proposal made to let new members, 1st time competitors have free contest entry fee as an incentive to join the chapter and the IAC. We will disseminate this info in the monthly newsletter. This is in addition to discounted banquet and party fees (on order of $5). Paul Gordon suggested free photo day support? We then discussed the IAC national effort based on Doug McConnell request for a list of new and non-renewing members periodically. We need to have a committed mentorship effort for new members at not only contests but for activities in general.

Calendar changes and updates

Photo day?

No date selected. Suggestion made to turn this activity over to Tom Shpakow as coordinator so long as he’s not in charge of the weather.

Spring IAC BoD meeting:

Bob proposed to the BoD that the spring meeting be held in the Denver area. He put a package of info together for the Hilltop Guest House and Suites (former location of the IAC12 judge’s schools). The sites in contention were Lakeland during SunNFun, Dallas and Denver. Doug Bartlett weighed the director’s feedback and selected the Denver location. The meeting will be held on Saturday April 9th. Bob will confirm whether or not it is open to the general membership. We agreed to at least attempt to organize a dinner on Friday or Saturday night near the hotel, which is open to our chapter members as a welcoming party and a “meet and greet” opportunity. We will also try to tap local resources to help with travel arrangements for members to and from DIA to the hotel.

Newsletter

Need to include a blurb on free contest entry fee for new members. We discussed having an opening “Message from the Chapter Leadership Team” article in each newsletter. We decided to rotate this task between Bob, DJ and Lark.

Judges school update

Price of judge’s school fees from headquarters has been decreased due the discontinuation of IAC national funding travel and lodging expenses for the instructors. These costs must come from the hosting chapter now. Since we have a local instructor (DJ Molny) we can reduce our fees.  DJ will be busy over the next couple of months traveling to out of state judges schools and snowboarding. Local schools will be at Western Air per plan…..no charge for the room.

End of Directors portion of the meeting occurred at 10:00.

 

Open membership meeting

Approximately 30 minutes were spent in greeting members as they arrived, hanger flying, catching up, etc. We had an excellent turnout with quite a few new members and several long time (won’t say OLD) members.

Lark introduced everyone. Bob ran through the same topics for the membership that were covered in the director’s meeting.

We then divided the group into 2 groups. DJ took those interested (mostly new folks) through the basics of the Primary and Sportsman sequence.

Bob took the other group through and exercise in generating unknown sequences to provide to Brian Howard for use in the 2011 contest season. The group generated 5 Intermediate and 1 Advanced unknown sequences. This was an excellent result. Bob entered the sequences onto his laptop using OLAN. The project provided a great tutorial to those interested in how to use the OLAN software. OLAN was developed by IAC member Michael Golan (Mikki to those who know him). He developed this cool tool and DONATED IT to the public. It has been widely adopted by IAC members as well as by the model aircraft aerobatic community. Very cool!

We had several members fly in to attend the meeting including: Jim McKinstry (Chipmunk), Pedja (Pitts S1T), Dagmar (Pitts S2C) and Leon Brody in his Lancair. Lark served burgers, dogs and soda for a $5 fee. Cooler weather and high wind forecasts kept the fly in attendance down, but we expect more fly in activity as the weather improves this spring. We will do some box practice work after the meeting when the interest and the weather materialize.

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