On Thursday, May 30, 2013 12:03:40 PM UTC-4, son_of_flubber wrote:
It would be useful to hear your tales of soaring software crashing and/or providing misleading or inaccurate information. Please be specific.



It would also be good to hear about cases of "user error" where you made a mistake in either setting up the device, misinterpreting the information displayed, or you found yourself confused or mislead by the way the information was presented. Of particular interest would be pitfalls that you stumbled upon in flight and how you resolved the difficulty.



I'd also like to hear about any cases of two devices running in parallel and presenting conflicting or diverging information (for example different indications of wind direction/speed or final glide arrival height).

At the Bus Class medium performance 2 place race at Wurtsboro last year, I was flying with a newcomer to racing. He's a CFI/CFIG, FO for a major airline, and aerospace engineering type. I'm a 25 year racing pilot, CFIG, with lots of XC and flight display experience.

Between the two of us, we couldn't figure out what the new (to us) open source flight display was telling us as we got down to rounding a final AAT turnpoint and trying to get home. Was it telling us glide to the turnpoint? Around the turnpoint to finish? Glide home from current position? Finally after removing shoes and socks and dividing by pi, I was able to figure out that we were fat with altitude to get home, but not before we had a couple of minutes of circling in a half knot while we tried to make sense of what we were seeing.

Just another one of those cases where familiarity with the increasingly sophisticated displays is best gained before it's crunch time.

P3