Jim Morley - A requiem

[vrhc]

An open letter to the RC helicopter community.

The RC helicopter world has just suffered another loss of one of our pioneers from the early days. From a personal view I will always regret not meeting him to discuss RC helicopter history as I had planned in 2009 and that opportunity is now gone.

As a sport/hobby call it what you will we are very poor in promoting our own outside of our relatively small circle. Put in a Google search for Jim Morley and prior to the last few days the first hit for our man was for my vintage helicopter website followed by a few forum threads; and that was it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Morley helicopters, love em, or hate em, there was no denying that Jim was a formative force during the early years of RC helicopters; especially in the UK. It has happened in the past with the likes of John Simone, John Gorham, Hiroyuki Oki, etc, etc. Very well known but memories of them fading with each year after their passing and it will happen again until finally it will get to JIM Who??

I will put forward the plea that this must not happen this time. True the magazines will run probably run articles (or not) but they have limited space and then it will die down.

As I said, the opportunity for his personal input has been lost to me and that was my own fault however, there are many of you out there who know a lot about the man, the company and well, whatever!! I therefore ask of you for your input, the good or even not so good (nobodys perfect), anything you can remember, pictures, in fact anything at all. I will co-ordinate it all into the Morley section of the Vintage RC helicopter web site for the memory to live on.

Joe (Vintage RC Helicopters) http://www.vrhc.co.uk