so we had our quarterly group flight thing last sunday, usually its like 15-20 people and its great, everyone chills out flies some laps or cruises around and we all talk gear for like 2 hours after. but this time someone invited a bunch of people from a different group and suddenly there was like 40+ people and the field got crowded real fast

one guys quad clipped a tree and came down pretty hard right near where some people were standing and that kinda killed the vibe. nobody got hurt but it got awkward. the frequency management was nonexistent too, i think two people were on the same vtx channel at some point which yeah

i still had fun but im wondering if these things just get worse when they scale up too fast, anyone had similar experiences with group flights getting too big

yeah this is pretty common unfortunately. the intimite smaller ones are always better in my experience. once you get past like 20 pilots you really need someone actually running the thing, like a designated frequency coordinator and maybe a flight director calling who goes up. otherwise its just chaos waiting to happen

the vtx channel thing is honestly dangerous if anyones flying fpv, someone loses video at the wrong moment and thats how quads end up in places they shouldnt be

honestly sounds like it was still a decent day despite the drama. near miss with the tree sucks but glad nobody got hurt. we had something similiar happen at a meet last year and the guy who organized it just quietly stopped inviting certain people after that which felt harsh but also like... necessary