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A Heli Community Editorial, #2:
The Vital Importance of Ethics in Our Hobby Industry.
Our model helicopter hobby is quite unique in many aspects. It is the only hobby that I know of that features what amounts to a two horsepower flying lawnmower tethered by a wispy quarter watt of RF energy. Every time I fly one of my helicopters, I am simply amazed at how the mechanical engineering tolerances and strength safety factors are sufficient to keep my heli from flying apart in an angry cloud of wood and metal shrapnel. These are machines that are dancing a fine line between controlled gyroscopic artistry and slashing, destructive mayhem. Frankly, this is why we love them too. They are marvelously complex and take years of trial, error, tinkering and trashing to truly feel you have developed anything akin to a mastery.
Beautiful when perfectly functional, but frightening and potentially lethal when something fails.
The modern model helicopter was developed over many years of trial and error, with engineers working hand in hand with customer pilots. Defects in design or manufacturing that did manage to slip by that interative design and trial cycle were always caught and reported by the end-user hobbyist. Why? Was it just because the owner was unhappy that his heli broke? No. ANY heli that has a part that fails in the air is a danger to the pilot and all bystanders. This desire to report part and design failures is a fundamental feedback process that is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to maintain and improve the SAFETY of the helicopters we fly. Nobody ever wants to hear that a helicopter product they designed or manufactured experienced a failure that produced a situation where someone got seriously hurt or killed. If the manufacturers of our helicopters are ever to be able to maintain and improve the safety of their products, information about their use, maintenance, failure and end-user experiences must not be impeded in ANY manner. End-user to manufacturer or end-user to end-user, this kind of information exchange is a vital part of the safety improvement aspect of our hobby. This is a quite obvious, common sense position.
Right about now, I can hear you asking, "But Alan, this is all well and good, but what has this got to do with ethics?"
It has EVERYTHING to do with ethics. In this competitive world we live in, from a manufacturers or distributors point of view, it is sometimes easy to loose sight of the overall goal to keep improving the safety of our helicopters, and to seek to control the public flow of negative information about profitable products. While this is understandable from a marketing point of view, it is a highly unethical and dangerous practice from a public safety standpoint. The buying public must be allowed FULL ACCESS to all information about these products, either good OR bad. Under no circumstances would it be ethical to deliberately seek to quelch or censor information about helicopter products that could directly or even indirectly relate to their quality, maintenance or operational safety.
No matter where in this hobby/industry you fit, end-user, retailer, manufacturer, web forum operator or distributor, you must... right now... ask yourself, "Am I helping to censor model helicopter information in any way?"
If you are, stop it, and stop it now. Our limbs and our very lives may depend upon it.
1/12/2003
You are free to reproduce this editorial, but please, only in it's entirety.
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