Graham Kennedy is nominated for the award of a Fellowship of the Society of Model Aeronautical Engineers, (FSMAE) for his sustained and outstanding contribution to promoting scale aeromodelling within the UK and beyond.

From his formative years attending scale competitions with his father Alex, Graham has immersed himself in serving the scale aeromodelling community. For many years, he has served on the Scale Technical Committee in various roles and for the last 6 years as Treasurer.

Graham is a much-respected member of the worldwide scale community, examples illustrating this are his involvement with FAI/CIAM, acting as an advisor to F4 Scale Teams Internationally, (most recently Brazil), and judging at the 2023 USA Scale Nationals and 2024 World Championships as well as using his contacts to help recruit judges to ensure the Championships in Romania proceeded.

Graham’s networking and organisational skills set him apart from the crowd. He has been the driving force behind successful bid for the UK to host the F4 World Championships in 2026. One of the challenges set by the BMFA Council was that any bid would have to be self-funding. Graham threw himself into single-handedly designing a fund raising business model. This involved engaging the scale community to donate unwanted aeromodelling items that Graham then sold through eBay or by attending swap meets around the country. As a result of his actions £35K has been raised to fund the bid and this amount continues to grow. Without Graham’s involvement this sum of money would not have been raised and the bid would not have been approved by the FAI.

Graham has also consistently demonstrated excellent organisational and planning skills in organising scale competitions both nationally and internationally. To illustrate, in 2023 he saw the opportunity to use his international connections to bring the Euro Scalemasters competition to run concurrently alongside the Scale Nationals at Buckminster. Graham identified that this would provide an opportunity to test the concept of using the national centre for a World Championships by hosting an international competition on site. The competition was an outstanding success and many of the lessons learnt will help in the planning for 2026.

Graham has demonstrated great innovation by embracing technology to promote scale aeromodelling. During the pandemic he recognised the need to keep the scale community nationally and internationally connected by organising and hosting a series of Zoom sessions providing an engaging presentation delivered by a topical guest speaker each month. Well supported, they remain active, continuing to connect scale aeromodellers worldwide.

Graham has been a driving and respected force in promoting scale modelling for over 20 years and awarding him a FSMAE is an appropriate recognition for his considerable achievements past, present and future.

As a Control Line combat team member between 1986 and 2008 Mervyn got to the final at three world championships in succession, all against the same Russian flyer and became 1994 world champion in Shanghai on the third attempt. Three world championship medals put Mervyn fifth on the all-time world championships medal winners list for F2d combat.

A European championship bronze completes his collection of class one medals as an F2d pilot. With one World and three European championship finals as an F2d mechanic, Mervyn’s assistance helped Mike Whillance on his way to becoming European Champion twice.

Domestically Mervyn has been BMFA control line national champion four times in F2d combat and has won both F2e and 1/2A at the Nationals. More recently Mervyn has been BMFA National champion in F2b and Classic aerobatics.

In 2012 Mervyn made the successful transition from F2d to F2b regularly making the team for both European and World Championships. Attending both World and European championships in F2b aerobatics in recent years makes Mervyn a flyer with the rare distinction of representing his country in two different events requiring very different skills.

As an organiser Mervyn ran domestic F2d combat competitions in the 2000s and judged at continental world cup competitions.

In 2018 he attended the world championship in France as assistant team manager.

Since 2012 Mervyn has been on the CLTC as the CL aerobatics representative and took over as chairman in 2022.

Since 2015 all BMFA domestic F2b aerobatics centralised competitions have been organised and run by Mervyn. As a member of the CLAPA (control line aerobatics pilots association) SIG Mervyn has taken a leading role in adopting new rules, particularly in classic which was effectively finished and now attracts a healthy entry when flown in addition to the promotion of Clubman to introduce sport flyers to competition flying in a relaxed way.

Mervyn has been proactive in supporting the National Centre from its earliest inception through organising most centralised CL competitions that are now held there. He has supported the building of the hard circles and most recently the laying out of the centre circles for F2b. Mervyn has actively supported the CL nationals’ successful events at the NC.

Has been supporting the BMFA outreach and education events with more planned for the future.