On Oct 27, 1:39*pm, John Smith wrote:
Bruce Hoult wrote:
What do you consider dangerous in cross country flying?

I've lost three friends by midairs during leisure cross country flying
but none during competition flying (all in Pre-FLARM-age). That's just
my purely personal, anectotcal and irrelevant statistics.

Where I fly, there are "glider highways" which can be pretty crowded on
thermally active weekends. With the difference that competition pilots
tend to be 100% awake, which cannot always be said of leisure pilots on
an 8 hour leisure flight. Interesting is that one of the midairs
mentioned above didn't happen on such a highway, but out in the nowhere
after the two gliders both had happily cruised along on a straight track
for several minutes (as the logger file showed), until they happened to
be in the same place at the same time. Again just my purely personal,
anectotical and irrelevant experience.

Back to the topic: I'm convinced that all three would still be alive had
FLARM already existed.

OK, that's a reasonable attitude, then. However, remember the
Social Scientist's creed: "The plural of anecdote is not data!"

The situation in the UK is that glider traffic is constrained into
class G
areas by low level class A, B, or C airline flyways. In the US, most
longer-distance (i.e. jets) airline traffic is over FL180 in class A,
and most
shorter-distance (i.e. turboprop) airline traffic is at lower
altitudes in class E.
Most GA traffic (except the high end corporate and charter stuff)
mingles
with everyone else in class E. Class B, C, and D is used to actively
control
the airspace around terminals (decreasing busyness goes with
decreasing
control levels).

Therefore, in the US glider cross country is more or less possible in
random directions, as constrained by local conditions (e.g. where I
fly
there are two class C complexes to the North and South of us, so we
usually fly to the W-NW or SE-NE). The glider traffic we see is
usually
our buddies from the same or a nearby club. Nearby usually means
50-100
miles where I've flown.

-- Matt