Model Airplanes

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — City Parks and Recreation Department director Barbara Taylor said she’s willing to “consider a compromise” to allow pilots of radio-controlled model airplanes to return to Arroyo del Oso Park, after a sometimes contentious 90-minute meeting.

It would involve fliers adopting rules of the Academy of Model Aeronautics regarding days and hours of flight, aircraft size, speed and height at which they can fly, and the like.

No date had been set for when the fliers, neighborhood association representatives and city officials might meet again. But City Councilor Brad Winter, whose district includes the park at Spain and Wyoming, said he was confident that, if all the concerned parties “come up with something that’s amenable to everybody,” an administrative exception to the ordinance under which the model planes are technically prohibited from the park can be adopted and “we can move forward quickly.”

Greg Rullman, president of the Duke City Electric Flyers, one of the groups that had been flying radio-controlled model aircraft at Arroyo del Oso, said he was ready to proceed in the drafting of formal rules, which he said would be easy. “Right now, there are rules in place, they are more unwritten, but the pilots already adhere to the AMA standard.”

The meeting Wednesday night packed a room at the North Domingo Baca Multigenerational Center near Wyoming and Paseo del Norte.

For more than 20 years, pilots had been flying their radio-controlled model aircraft at Arroyo del Oso Park. Although a city ordinance prohibits such activity in most parks,

Article source: http://www.abqjournal.com/738840/news/compromise-may-allow-model-aircraft-to-fly-again.html

VENICE – When the main runway at the Venice Municipal Airport reopens to aviation traffic Friday, it will feature a new $4 million emergency landing system designed to stop airplanes that overshoot the landing from ending up in the Intracoastal Waterway.

In an unconventional christening of the new runway Wednesday, local dignitaries ground little model airplanes into crushable concrete blocks as they stood before the new Engineered Materials Arresting System.

“Under the weight of an aircraft or a vehicle, the landing gear goes into the block to deaccelerate the aircraft and stop it, before it goes into the Intracoastal,” Venice Airport Manager Chris Rozansky said.

“It is a single use system so the first time an aircraft goes in it, it does have to be replaced,” he added.

The crushable concrete is a proprietary mix that has the texture of pumice, or volcanic rock, with tiny air chambers. The 2,560 blocks in the system each cost $1,300.

That’s all part of a $9.2 million restructuring of the main runway that included adding 639 feet of pavement prior to the EMAS system. That changed flight traffic enough that most of about two dozen homes in the Gulf Shores neighborhood, on the Gulf of Mexico side of the airport, will no longer be considered part of the airport’s runway protection zone.

Twenty-three homes were removed from that zone, though the shift in landing pattern added two others — meaning that three homes are currently in that zone.

“What we did here was enhance safety for the whole airport,” said

Article source: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20160309/article/160309614