At 18:19 18 October 2012, Mike the Strike wrote:
I'm with Dave on this one. Even though we have seen competitors zoom off
t=
owards a PowerFlarm target they saw climbing strongly, I am not sure this
w=
ill turn out to be the advantage many wish for. I can't count the times
I
=
have ended up a thousand feet or so below a colleague climbing at ten
knots=
to find nothing there - the thermal bubble had departed upwards!

My opinion is that knowing the location of nearby competitors is useful
for=
both safety and tactics, but will impart no advantage if the information
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s available to everyone. I strongly oppose the adoption of the "stealth'
m=
ode for this reason.

Mike

We did have a period of about 2 years where competition directors were
"instructed" to mandate stealth mode. Despite this I never did for the very
simple reason that I was very uncomfortable with the concept of instructing
pilots to lessen the efficiency of an anti-colision assistance device.
While we do not have the same "litigate everything" culture that exists
elsewhere I could see some grieving relative making a claim on me for
contributing to the death of their loved one by lessening safety, unlikely
maybe but that is the way things are going even here in the UK.
It is just not possible to uninvent something and rest assured, like
artificial horizons on iPhones, someone will make and install a gizzmo just
to give them an advantage and it will be cheaper than FLARM. The only way
forward is to accept that such things are going to be used whatever you do
so the only sensible way is to not mandate against it,