SBSA No Land Fields

[sd]

Wanted to comment further regarding the ongoing discussion at last night’s SBSA meeting about PR issues with landowners annoyed with repeated PG landings on their property. As JG noted, the increasing problem could have downstream consequences as some of the property owners have deep pockets and the ability to tarnish our credibility with various entities that we may want something from (like the city of SB and the LPNF).

As SA noted, there is no magic bullet or app that will “solve” our increasing dilemma.
We are an “at will” common interest organization with no actual legal authority to “regulate” anything other than perhaps our activity at Elings. The best we can do is strive for consensus and cooperation. We have the added issue that during our “season”, many (likely a majority?) of the pilots are not year-round residents, so there is an information and communication objective.

Most of us are males, and many have adequate testosterone to be opinionated, so there is no shortage of ideas. It isn’t realistic that everyone will agree on everything. We only achieve community objectives via volunteer effort and contribution. I think (just my personal opinion) that the 2 most effective tools to minimize annoying landowners are:

1) a central location for information. The “Visiting Pilots” tab on the SBSA website that points to the “SBSA No land fields” interactive map on the Site Guidelines page.
and
2) our numerous volunteers who are willing to donate their precious personal time and varied knowledge to assist visiting pilots by giving site briefings and requesting the visitors review the Site Guidelines (including the No Land map if they intend to go XC)

Sites like Crestline and Sylmar “own” there main LZs, so they have more control and authority. Santa Barbara has a paved road open to the general public. We are more likely to realize our collective objectives by soliciting cooperation rather than mandating? By striving to be gracious host, most visiting pilot will likely respect our concerns if they are made aware of what those concerns are. As Willy noted last night, a visiting pilot’s bandwidth is limited, so we need to keep it simple, like suggesting that if you want to go XC low, pilots should review the SBSA No land fields.

There was also discussion (last night) about providing info on where to land (green). This can be problematic because it could funnel pilots into places that are “gray” and might become “red” if overused. There is room for more information and improvement to offer guidance on potential “green” LZs like Hammonds, Summerland Memorial Park, Padaro, Linden, Viola, and maybe even seasonal options like the Polo Fields and some gray options with notation to avoid overuse, but someone has to initially "take ownership" to produce and or manage the content.

Our website was recently “overhauled”. The initial objective was to provide a more manageable structure. Note that we have some resources, but we (SBSA) are not a large for-profit corporation with big budgets. Everything is done by volunteers who have “day jobs” and limited time resources. The website redesign initially had some content that was questionably, but I am personally heartened to see much of the tone has softened and some of the arguably incorrect statements have been rephrased.

There is room for enhancements that can assist in our collective objectives. If you want to contribute, you can pick a project, or a small piece of a project, or host a committee to work on an issue like building a listing of LZs, outlining their particular flight or public relation issues.

We have done committee work in the past
http://scpa.info/committee
and some of the “reports” are still relevant today, like:
http://scpa.info/committee/radio/protocol.htm