On Jan 9, 9:57*am, chris wrote:
On Jan 9, 10:18*am, Andy wrote:

If seeing other competitors climb rates is a competitive advantage
then that's *an additional incentive for everyone to equip with
PowerFLARM.
Andy (GY)

So at what point do we just call them "cross country cooperative fly
togethers" and remove the words competition and contest?

The ideal setup is a duo discus with large format computer screens,
the guy in back can just operate the computers and track all the other
gliders and navigate to each marked thermal.

Chris

That happens today. I've been SN-10 operator, navigator, thermal
scout, glider spotter and tactician as a passenger. With an
experienced back-seater it can be a big advantage - adding a Flarm
seems a small incremental bump in capability compared to the value of
adding a good back-seater in the first place.

I will be very interested to see if the concern about Flarm taking
most of the skill out of contest flying comes to pass. Good pilots
today are skilled at finding fast climbing gliders within a few miles,
just using their eyeballs. I don't consider that a detriment to
competition. I don't consider GPS to be a detriment to competition
either - or Spots, or radios, or transponders, or compasses, or
variometers or altimeters, or supplemental oxygen or parachutes for
that matter.

9B