On Jan 28, 1:59*pm, "noel.wade" wrote:
P.S. *Since most people don't know me that well, let me explain my
attitude towards technology and distractions in the cockpit:

I'm the kind of IT guy who yells at everyone to stop playing with
their PDAs and flight computers, and to keep their eyes OUTSIDE! :-P

I fly with a PDA myself, but all I do is glance at it occasionally to
determine 3 things (in this order):

1) Am I where I think I am?
2) Does the computer think I can make it to any airports/landout spots
(i.e. "What's my escape route right now")?
3) How far is it to my desired waypoint?

I set my systems up so that this is all "no-hands" operation, and I
rarely, if ever, monkey with the PDA in flight (usually only when on
casual flights and the Wx is not what was forecast, so I change my
waypoints to fly in a different part of the sky). Even then, I only do
it while in straight-and-level flight when I'm not near other gliders
or aircraft... and I only go "heads-down" for 5 - 10 seconds at a
time. *That means these small changes can take a couple of minutes;
but I've had a couple of near-collisions while flying powered aircraft
- so I REALLY value "see and avoid"!

Now, back to cameras... *any thoughts?

--Noel

Umm... just a practical suggestion here...
you might want to spend that time practicing a few PDA tasks
before the contest. You will fly area tasks and MAT tasks there,
which
mostly don't correspond to what you fly at home. Both of those
require
some special PDA skills that you need to do effortlessly in the
cockpit.
They're not hard, but they are specialized.

I'm with you on the whole "look outside" issue, but I did spend my
off season last year learning how to use the area task features of
SoarPilot using Condor. They were very helpful, and they meant that
I didn't need to fiddle with the PDA very much while flying my tasks.

Now, back to the camera stuff. The camera or videocam will both be
very useful on the ground when you're not flying. You'll find out
that you'll
have a blast with the social life at the contest, and the camera shots
and videos will reflect that. That will be a real good selling point
for your friends back home. For videos shot during the flight, it
would
be nice if you could put a camera behind your left ear that can see
the
instrument panel and outside, but I wouldn't spend much time on it.

-- Matt