[khamai]

GGLC Autocrossers -

First, thanks for attending yesterday's event. It was enjoyable and great to see everyone enjoying their cars and one another. It was another challenging and fun course, thank you Ben for a great design.

Second, we had a bit of excitement when a visiting helicopter visited our event. For many it was an unexpected, dusty, crazy interruption to the event. This morning the GGLC received the following letter from the pilot.

Dear GGLC fellow autocrossers,

I just wanted you guys and the entire Golden Gate Lotus Club membership to know that I am sincerely sorry for upsetting anyone yesterday for flying a helicopter over the course. I've been a member of GGLC for the past 2 years and have greatly enjoyed autocrossing and learning about the fine points of car handling and precision driving from other GGLC members. It's incredibly satisfying to learn a new course and improve one's elapsed time through the course. I just wish I could be faster at learning the course, and faster at driving it! Anyway, this past event, I didn't sign up as Shelly and Ken (who generously let me drive their Lotus Elise) had limited tread left on their tires. I thought it'd be fun to come and watch and flew a helicopter to the Marina airport. Some of the drivers came over and said hi, and I came over and watched the cars run for a while, and was getting ready to leave. As a joke, someone said wouldn't it be fun to see a helicopter flying the course. This discussion took on a life of its own, and became one of those things that seemed to be a good idea at the time, but are distinctly stupid in retrospect. I've been flying for 30 years, and have over 6000 hours in airplanes and helicopters and should have had better judgment than flying directly over the course, but I did. It was only later that I realized that:

-to most non-pilots, helicopters may be associated with bad situations (Lifeflight helos evacuating injured people, police helos looking for fugitives, military helos on an assault mission, etc) and may look and sound threatening

-in spite of my sensitivity to not blowing any cones down (and delaying the afternoon fun runs), I blew some down, and that means that the rotor downwash kicked up a lot of dust and gravel, and probably caused a lot of discomfort

-most of the drivers had no idea what was going on, and thought that some idiot in a helicopter suddenly showed up and pulled a dumb stunt. The mortifying thing is that they were absolutely right!

So anyway, please accept my most sincere apologies. Though I've shown up for every GGLC event this season, and greatly enjoy autocross, I'm giving up my membership voluntarily as a gesture of contrition. If you guys ever let me back in the club, please let the membership know that anybody that was upset with me can at least count on a beer from me at one of the Mountain Mike post-autocross dinners, and I'd also be pleased to talk to them about helicopter ops or take them on a helicopter flight (even if they were not upset with me). I would hate to give people the wrong impression about general aviation. By the way, I'm also willing to come in and help with setting up and taking down the course, and (ouch!) not taking my runs.

/s/ name deliberately leftoff by Kiyoshi

Cheers,
Kiyoshi
GGLC Webguy

PS. The GGLC accepts this apology and appreciates the gesture, but does not accept the pilot's membership resignation. No-harm, no-foul. I'm sure within a short time we'll be sitting around laughing at the time a helicopter ran our course at one of our events!