Dan G wrote:
On Oct 26, 4:07 pm, Ian wrote:
I have never used it myself [1] but I was chatting about it just a few
days ago with an instructor at a busy ridge site here. His view was
that it's a menace: it generates far too many false alarms, and pilots
who try to evade non-existent hazards may thereby cause significant
danger. What are you supposed to do, he asked, if you get a six-second-
t-death warning about a glider which is supposedly dead ahead but
which you can't see? He reckoned the main problem was that the system
only believes in "cruising" and "thermalling" and gets hopelessly
confused by the turn at the end of a beat on the ridge.

Sounds like you're talking about the SGU trial at Portmoak (or at
least, that's the same as the opinion of one vocal instructor there -
whether or not those are the conclusions the SGU arrive at themselves
remains to be seen). They fly a rather short ridge (only a few km)
which is not representative of normal glider operations - not sure
that their findings, when published, can be extrapolated beyond their
own circumstances.

Lasham, by contrast, did find that Flarm met their needs (no doubt
partly motivated by the fatal collision there in 2004). They're a flat-
land thermal site - probably the busiest in the UK. I think the fact
that their entire fleet (some thirty gliders and tugs) has been fitted
with Flarm, and that many more units are being fitted to the private
fleet there, is a strong endorsement.

Only flown there once and the weather was lousy, but I would hardly call those
things thermals ;-)

Dan