On 7/26/2012 8:50 PM, son_of_flubber wrote:
But getting back to the original topic... Does anyone see merit in putting
PowerFlarm in club gliders and towplanes?

History may repeat itself...sort of. :-)

"Way back when" (in the ancient late '70's or early '80's) Wil Schuemann made
a similar, well reasoned, argument ships/pilots that would likely benefit most
from his short-time-constant, taut wire mechanical variometer were the club
trainers (most of 'em burdened with glacial, sticky mechanical varios that
even in their best days had longer time constants than his slowest Sage vario)
flown by struggling, wannabe soaring pilots. He presented his reasoning in a
full-color, full-/multi-page ad in "Soaring" mag; IMO this ad easily exceeded
many articles in meat and informational content.

I thought then Wil was correct in his assessment, and have never seen fit to
change my opinion.

To this day I've never seen a Sage vario in any club primary trainer. (Draw
your own conclusions!)

At first blush I'm inclined to agree with your PFlarm assessment (with "the
usual cautionary proviso" about it maybe becoming yet another instrument for a
newbie to fixate upon...IF installed, will prolly give those dedicated
instructors one more thing to caution about!). That said, I'll wager some
cheap beer few will appear in that segment of the fleet, for a small host of
"too much effort/cost/system complexity" reasons...

Bob - not every good idea succeeds - W.