SEN 2509
- Shed #5
- Motor Bike for Sale
- Innovation – Yes , Retro – ?
Shed #5
From : Brian Van Nest
Lost Hills Motorcycle storage in new Shed #5 available mid December of 2018.
A one time fee of $600.
Please contact Brian Van Nest @ bisheatf1a@aol.com
Motor Bike for Sale
Motorcycle for sale 1981 Honda XR-100
Asking price $700. For information by phone call Peter Allnutt @ 1-661-763-5039 (no text)
For information by internet including picture
Brian Van Nest bisheatf1a@aol.com
Innovation – Yes , Retro – ?
From: Rick Pangell
On the Sympo
Gil said:
” Need spurns invention”? We have been there, done that. Something
like reverse engineering?
Just kidding. We know what you mean.
Gil
Gil, I appreciate that an take the hit… the question is the “Blue Sky” Requirements… then what?
For comment, what if someone invents a new tiny package deployable F1C that gets 500 feet in 4 seconds… hmmm… is that on the horizon? Plus the implications of sources. Will rules drive invention or does invention drives the rules?
Design is like being the play coach on a football team. But there is only one rule… you can only get halfway to the goal on any given play, so who’s the best coach?
You’ve got a great team, but a good coach knows when to kick the field goal… or does he beg the league to move the goal posts or invent a new ball? Sometimes we can over analyze things too much and keep the goal line moving to far.
In the past few years there has been a movement to “simplify” this sport with NOS, Golden Age, Classic, etc. There must be a reason.
Sorry about the metaphor.
Rick Pangell –
Editor’s observation …
Rick, this maybe what the intended Sympo articles are all about but I look at it a little like this. You made the comment
“In the past few years there has been a movement to “simplify” this sport with NOS, Golden Age, Classic, etc. There must be a reason.”
I don’t dispute that there is probably a need to simplify. But going retro in the example you give to simplify it is for the geezers who look back to their youth and the things that they understand. A young person is not going to be interested when they always refer back to how great it used to be and all the modern stuff is garbage. In the FAI classes where we “should” have open innovation we have got to a place where the process of changing the rules is very cumbersome and discourages cooperative innovation, there is no way of piloting potential rules changes, geezer contingent is very resistant to change and active participants lack confidence in the governing organizations to make reasonable changes.
I’m not saying that any category we fly is bad and we should not do it, if people like flying it go for it. But for the future we need to attract new younger people. Contrary to a popular belief that young people don’t like building things the “Maker” movement and upswing in STEM activities shows that young people like building things and innovating, just not in our space. How do we fix that ?
If we draw a parallel with motor sports. The top classes of motor sports where most of the young people (15 to 35) are interested in are the modern classes e.g – F1, NASCAR, DTM, Indy Car, sports cars – LMP, World Rally Championship, Australian Supercars, F3, Indy Lights , in many countries there is also interest in Historic Racing (I’ve been to the Goodwood events ) and many people enjoy it but this not where the top interest is from the key “young demographic”. The motor sport rule makers and promotors are not perfect and followers of motor sports have seen some notable foul ups but they still do better than us.
What the modern motor sport classes do a bit better than us is manage the rules in terms of both cost and performance while still permitting technical innovation. There are lots of seemingly arcane rules that try to control cost and enable enough people to take part to make the event interesting. In our flying events the challenge often discussed how to fit the event into the available sites, this is also a problem for motor sport events and they have an additional issue of doing it safely, so they adapt the rules to do that. Of course the motor sport events we talk about here are professional events and these are the ones that get the most press but if you go to the “beginners classes” , all sanctioning bodies from FIA to NASCAR are aware of the same issues.
If we look at the past of model flying we see people that were young innovators and ended up in key positions in the aerospace industry. Just one example of this is Brian Eggleston who designed the Creep way back in the 60s. I made one then but I didn’t realize how young Brian was at the time, clearly a young innovator. He went on to have a leading position the Canadian Aerospace industry and now back in modelling is still innovating with airfoil design. A person who is going to that has to be an innovator and leader. We need to figure how to attract some more of those people, simple is good, innovation important, retro not so key.
Finally to be an innovator or geezer is not to question of calendar years but a state of mind, both Gil and Brian mentioned above may have a few years on many of us but are still innovators with more new ideas than most of us.