Excuse me for borrowing my old column title from the nine years I spent as the Editor of Stunt News; it just still seemed fitting.
In this case I’m the new Content Editor for our brand new PAMPA website. And this seems like the place and time to take a moment to stop and give some much deserved credit to our amazing Webmaster, Jake Moon. Our website has long needed updating, and Jake did a whole lot more than that; he completely re-designed the site and added a ton of features that will result in many value-added benefits for our members. So, the next time you see our newly crowned Advanced National Champion, walk up to him and give him a sincere “thank you” for his outstanding volunteer efforts. Jake has also teamed up with Matt Colan to produce an upgraded printed version of Stunt News. So, thank each of them when you see them. Better yet, send each of them a note of thanks; their addresses are in the newly updated PAMPA roster that is featured on the new site.
I’ve been a cheerleader for PAMPA since I joined as a charter member at the 1973 Nats in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. PAMPA grew quickly in those days due mainly to the efforts of Wynn Paul, Keith Trostle, Frank McMillan, and Les McDonald. At our peak we had well over 1,500 members, and a mission to promote communication between people who flew Stunt, and a commission to run the CL Stunt event at the AMA National Championships as the officially recognized SIG (Special Interest Group) for Control Line Precision Aerobatics. But beyond that we had another reason for being, and that was to educate and help those who wanted so dearly to get involved with Control Line Aerobatics. That was facilitated to a great degree by our newsletter, Stunt News. At its peak, Stunt News was a bi-monthly, 100-page actual magazine. There have been a number of people who have produced and edited Stunt News over the years, but in my mind the lion’s share of the credit for making it a meaningful house organ for PAMPA goes to the late Tom Morris. Tom envisioned a publication that could cover all aspects of our sport and be a teaching tool to educate and help any and all who wanted to learn about Stunt. When I eventually took the helm at Stunt News I tried to continue on in the tradition that Tom had started.
As our numbers diminished due to aging and other factors, producing a 100-page newsletter was just not fiscally doable. Paper, printing, and postage became increasingly, and prohibitively, more expensive. So, there was a period when much meaningful information was not getting out to our membership. For a while Chris Rud published a newsletter, and then David Shorts did what he could in publishing one, but given the limitations they faced in the above mentioned paper, printing, and postage costs, there was only so much information that could be passed along, and even that was reduced to a quarterly format. Still, thanks are in order to Chris and David for their good faith efforts.
In the same manner, Jake Moon and Matt Colan are now doing their best to produce an informative newsletter, albeit still in a quarterly format, and limited to far less pages than our old newsletter. And it is here that this new website format can and must be used to regrow PAMPA and educate new enthusiasts, while at the same time servicing our long-time members.
I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a lot of modelers who fly stunt to one degree or another. Many of them are of the opinion that PAMPA exists only to serve the serious competition Stunt fliers. And, if you were to look at it through their eyes, you might understand why they think that way. What has PAMPA done for them lately?
My interpretation of a “Stunt Flier” is anyone who intentionally deviates from level flight. Yeah, that’s a bit broad, but it is in my opinion how we have to think if we have any hope of returning PAMPA anywhere near it’s former status. And in my mind that’s how we have to approach our job of populating the new website with information and news. We need to make the website so informative and helpful that even aerobatic fliers who do not participate in CL Stunt competition will find it indispensable.
How do we accomplish that? We can—and have already begun to—go back into our rich library of archived issues of Stunt News and pull out all the great informative articles and republish them in a format that is easily accessed. The next step is to find and publish new articles that cover the spectrum of the building and flying experience. Lots of the old stuff is still viable and relevant, but there are always new things being discovered, and this website format is the fastest and most logical way to present them.
I used the words, “value-added” earlier, and that’s what will really make this website enable PAMPA to grow quickly. Access to information about building and flying, certainly, but also the ability to find fliers in any geographical area through our roster, and then possibly make a new friend and/or flying partner; a contest calendar that informs all of us as to what contests might be makable; a rich library of PAMPA plans for original design Stunt models; and an equally rich bank of downloadable PDF manuals and articles that will add to the overall experience.
To achieve these goals we will need for all our members to get involved and not only support our efforts, but also contribute. Each of us has something to offer that can be of benefit to others. We each find different ways of accomplishing modeling tasks, and those ideas might be useful to others. We each encounter problems with trimming, and sharing the remedies can also help others. In my 35-plus years of editing model airplane magazines and newsletters, the most challenging thing was to find enough useful information to fill the pages. A magazine or newsletter can be likened to a wood burning stove; it consumes a lot of material in a day, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. And the stove has to refilled with more wood. A website is a bit different. The “material” is not consumed, it is archived, and each time something new is added the overall depth of experience and knowledge is expanded.
The biggest roadblock to getting people to write, in my experience, has been the fear that they will not sound good in print. Not everyone is a natural writer. I know I wasn’t. When I was brought aboard at Flying Models magazine in 1979, writing was terrifying to me. I overcompensated by trying to use words, humor, and phrasing that I thought a “writer” would use. It didn’t sound like me when I read it. One of my fellow editors at Carstens Publications, Jim Boyd – Editor of Rail Fan magazine – took me to lunch and told me that I was a functional illiterate. Yup, I lost my appetite at hearing that. Then he gave me the good news. He knew that I was well versed in the subject matter of my magazine and told me to start writing as if I were setting at my workbench and talking with a fellow modeler across the bench. That did the trick. Now I enjoy writing almost as much as building and flying.
What’s my point? Well each of you reading this has something to share with this audience. The important thing is not how you “sound” in print, the important thing is sharing an idea, thought, design, procedure, etc., with the rest of us. It’s our job – the website crew – to do whatever is required to make your contributions read and present well.
So, in closing, we now have an excellent website that can grow quickly to be an invaluable resource. We need your input to help achieve that goal. We also need you to inform all your flying buddies that PAMPA is not just here for the competition minded. It is an organization for all who “intentionally deviate from level flight.”
