On Oct 27, 11:40 pm, Ian wrote:
On 26 Oct, 18:18, Ramy wrote:

On Oct 26, 9:07 am, Ian wrote:
SNIP

Anyway, my human eyes have successfully detected /all/ threats in time
to avoid them so far. How common are midair glider collisions?

Ian

How do you know what you have detected *all* threats in time. What
margin of safety is that down to? How do you know other aircraft (and/
or ATC) did not take action to avoid you and you were never aware of
them? I personally do not use logic like "my past landing attempt did
not kill me so my landings are great" but I look at what you are
saying as "I've not run into anything sofar therefore my visual
lookouts are perfectly adequate" - it is not a high threshold for
fidelity in this discussion, especially when you appreciate how much
the big sky is actually part of being responsible for you still being
alive. Do you routinely do clearing turns while cruising along to
clear all those large blind spots we have? How clear of clouds do you
really stay? How do you see fast traffic about to come out the cloud?
Have you ever seen how really hard it is to see a white glider closing
at over 100 knots head on against snow laden white mountainous
background?

Go fly in an aircraft with a TCAS or PCAS or similar and see how much
general traffic you don't spot until the system warns you to really
look or (carefully) turn the aircraft so you can see traffic. Flying
with a PCAS in my gliders has warned me a few times to start looking
intensely for traffic (much more than you would be able to do
continuously as a part of standard traffic scanning). The few closest
ones have been power traffic, in uncontrolled but high density traffic
areas some close and very oblivious to my glider being there at all.
From what I've seen the adoption of PCAS units like the Zaon MRX are
very viral. Lots of non believers until one or two glider pilots start
using them and then start reporting they really work, especially all
the traffic they otherwise would not notice...

Oh yes I've deliberately not stuck to Flarm, and I think Flarm would
be a very bad move for the USA. We need gliders in high traffic areas
with Transponders and PCAS today and ADS-B in future. Too many of us
fly in very high traffic areas, we need to be visible to and
communicating with power traffic and ATC as well as worrying about
glider-glider conflicts. Politically I am much more worried about a
glider taking out a passenger jet than I am about glider-glider
collisions. The last person who wanted to argue with me strongly that
mid-air collisions do not happen was flying with me in a Duo Discus
near Minden when not far away the ASG-29 met with a Hawker. Hell of a
way to win an argument.

Darryl