I would prioritize by putting the system in the planes that spend the most
time near airports that have TIS coverage. Usually that would be low end
trainers, rather than cross country type of aircraft.

Mike Schumann

"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
My club has started thinking about putting Mode-S transponders in our
aircraft (3 Archers, 2 Arrows, 2 Bonanzas), to take advantage of traffic
advisory information.

Does anybody here have Mode-S in their plane now? Do you make use of
the traffic info? How well does it work? How easy is it to use? What
do you display the info on?

Is the technology mature enough to invest in today, or do we risk being
on the bleeding edge? One possible route we're thinking of is not
investing wholesale in Mode-S, but waiting for our existing xponders to
die and specify Mode-S in the replacement units.

We're slowly moving towards MFDs in all our planes. Right now, out of 7
planes, we've got one MX-20, one CNX-80, and we're probaby looking at
two more CNX-80's before the summer. How does the traffic info interact
with the other displays? Does it just over-lay the moving map? Do you
need to dedicate a display to traffic?

We've got two schools of thought as to where traffic info would do the
most good, i.e. on a limited budget, which planes do we start equipping
with it first. One school says put it int the Bonanza because it's the
fastest mover. Higher airspeed, less time to see and react to traffic.

On the other hand, the Bonanzas are the most likely to be doing
high-altitude straight line legs from one place to another, so pilot
workload is low most of the time, and ATC is watching (either IFR or VFR
flight following). The Archers are more likely to be low down where
there's lots of traffic, doing training maneuvers without flight
following and where high pilot workload leads to a less effective
traffic scan than most people would care to admit in public.

Any and all thoughts on the subject would be appreciated.