On Oct 2, 1:43*am, wrote:
Hey John:

How about we all look outside for things we would prefer not to midair?

The nature and volume of discussion regarding "climb maximizer" screens suggests that many pilots are seriously focused "head-down" while thermaling..

I know everyone will soundly proclaim that this is absolutely not the case and that they are maintaining an appropriate traffic scan and situational awareness while simultaneously checking the maximizer screen but I do not believe it.

Are glider pilots becoming the airborne equivalent of the modern teen-ager who walks into the shopping mall fountain, head-down while staring at their electronic devices? *I tend to believe this is true which leaves me horrified.

The solution? *FLARM, of course!

Addictions come in many flavors.

I am sympathetic to Mark's worry. It gets worse (for me) when I
consider how many of YOU want real time wx in the cockpit, flarm radar
with glide slope to the best gaggle and goodness know what else. I
think many instrument makers are breeding very nearsighted video ga...
er, "pilots".

The WP optimizer is worthy of a comment because it was reasonably well
designed for minimum pilot fuss. It told you when to roll wings level
to center the thermal and as these things go, didn't require much
attention. I did feel like I needed to go shower after using it, but
as I've said elsewhere, my problem was actually a buggy vario.

The XCSoar optimizer I thought was a joke. What XCSoar did that I
thought really handy was calculate the center of lift and display this
on the map, drifted for calculated wind. This saved my ass a couple
of times when trying to dig out at the end of the day. You know the
scenario: planning your landing, oops here's a thermal, three turns
going up, start to relax a little and whoa!, where'd the little
stinker go? If it hadn't dissipated, XCSoar generally knew where the
center was. Obviously, one had to be zoomed in, real close, for this
to be effective.

The track function in CN sort of works for optimizing when zoomed all
the way in, though it becomes much less useful in direct proportion to
wind because it simply reports lift vs your (2d) gps location
history. I hope people are not over using this. To the extent that
we need a thermal centering tool in CN, I hope we can come up with
something better (it's not the top priority). Imo the current
presentation isn't "efficient" enough. The whole strength of CN is
hitting you with all the info you need at any given instant, at a
glance. We want your eyeballs pointed outside the cockpit.

T8