As a paid-up member I was taken aback to read it's membership has declined by some 10% in recent years, which they attribute to:
(a) Government travel restrictions (Ed. on the gravy-train?)
(b) Aerospace market contraction
(c) Declining research funding
(d) The 'bowling alone' effect
(e) An ageing workforce
I would add that its location in the US, formerly a benefit, will be of declining value. A look at the expo in Shenzen if nothing else (the size of fourteen football fields) will convince most of us that the real innovation in vertical flight is all taking place with drones, and practically all of that in China. DARPA's heavy-lift challenge was entirely welcome in this regard, but looked like a village fete in comparison.
The VFS has too been bank-rolled by the military-industrial complex, with members in the US and Europe with a sour-grape 'not invented here' purview of what is going on with drones. This in turn means ~ they paying the piper ~ there has to be wholly more articles on incremental improvements to conventional means of flight than on any other. Which is of great interest to the aging community referred to above, but of little or no interest to my fourteen year-old son.
Organisation of the UK chapter, from which I was ejected for suggesting we meet at bars on Harley-Davidsons and sleep with menstruating women by way of induction, is a case in point. Organised by one man in Glasgow and one in Liverpool, invariably they arrange meets in London ~ because that's a half-hour from Farnborough where most of the MIC is based.
But to a great extent it is down to the digitisation of every means of doing anything. For what makes driverless taxis worth reviewing is not the car so much as what is making it tick ~ and as that's a series of charges on a silicone chip it doesn't make for good copy. I headed up training in full-motion simulators that were literally the front end of airliners; but what I did is done nowadays by a company called LOFT which relies on VR headsets to do much the same thing for a fraction of the cost.
Do I have a remedy? Yes, but it is to relocate to Atlantic City, rebrand as a Vertical Fight Society and let the academics have it out in a cage whilst we place bets during a global livestream.
Ed. And can we have this published among correspondence in 'Vertiflite' please?
