Don Johnstone wrote:

snip

I am sorry if my opion offends and seems negative but
the answer to this problem is a human one, better education,
better training, better awareness of the problem and
potential hazards and perhaps even a change in the
way we view flying close to each other.

Don, I'm not offended by your opinion - I just don't understand it.
Better everything would be, well... better - but it's a goal that has
existed forever and it hasn't answered the problem yet. Perfect
education, perfect training, perfect awareness, etc. would be an answer,
but it's just not available. Lets be honest with ourselves - in the
real world of jobs, families, weather, and long commutes to the
gliderport all of those betters are just *not* going to happen, at least
not in any systemic way.

My subjective view is that the majority of collisions
take place between aircraft that know exactly where
the other aircraft is yet still manage to make contact.
This is certainly true of the military who as I said
earlier are the only other significant organisation
that encourage aircraft to fly close together. I really
don't see how another gadget in the cockpit can help
unless it is very sophisticated indeed.

Let's try on another analogy and see how it fits - automobiles.
Hundreds of modestly-trained individuals moving in tight formation,
passing within a meter of one another, closure rates of 200+ kph, etc.
Horribly complex to analyze, and no system has yet been invented that
will recognize a bad situation and reliably guide the driver out of it.
Thankfully, rather than say "can't be done - let's have some more
driver education" the auto industry has provided any number of safety
"gadgets" such as airbags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, proximity
radar, and on and on. For each individual gadget there are plenty of
straw-man situations that can be conjectured for which the gadget
doesn't help, but of much greater significance are the lives saved in
situations where the gadget *did* help.

No one advocating the FLARM or other hypothetical system thinks it can
safely guide a pilot out of *all* possible collision situations - let's
stop debating it's usefulness in a 40-ship gaggle. Can we agree that
there are *some* or perhaps *many* situations where it could help, and
were it available and widely deployed today at least *some* of this
year's mid-airs might have been avoided.

I'd buy one.

Dave