On Tuesday, December 8, 2015 at 11:45:57 AM UTC-8, XC wrote:
On Tuesday, December 8, 2015 at 10:16:09 AM UTC-5, Andy Blackburn wrote:
I am skeptical of the usefulness of an instantaneous God-map of lift. The weather is too dynamic for that and gliders just don't cover anywhere near enough of the available territory. The occasional convergence line or other local secret will be a little less secret and the occasional newbie landout will be avoided. Racing will be ever so slightly more competitive because some of the randomness of getting stuck for 45 minutes or landing out will go away - some, not most, certainly not all. You can take comfort in the certainty that people will still land out. If you want more landouts we can go back to requiring all assigned tasks or making tasks a lot longer. Oddly, packing gliders tighter together with more leeching possible has been associated with more landouts, not less.

Power pilots have a different name for what glider pilots call lift - turbulence. I can't imagine any serious power flight deciding to run glider lift lines to save energy or gain speed. It's a rough ride and makes it harder to hold altitude steady. I've tried it. The FAA won't be a fan - ever. Plus there are more power planes than gliders by a lot. They get a lot more benefit out of matching flight levels to more favorable winds.

I just don't see giving the pilot more information as a bad thing and setting rules to filter information to the pilot seems a losing battle.

Cheap Lidar will arrive eventually. It could be cool. Blipmaps are cool too - on convergence and wave days they take most of the guesswork out of where the lift will be. I quite like Blipmaps, but I'm not going to program them into an autopilot.

9B

Andy,
You are assuming here that we will develop and use all these great things and somehow stop short of being able to fly around more or less at will. It is hard to imagine now, yes, but who is to say what is possible.

Remember that general aviation will evolve as well. Flying in a straight line may be a thing of the past as we find a more energy efficient way of navigating the sky for them. Holding altitude will fall by the wayside as well as it is very inefficient. GA aircraft may come to look very much like gliders. They may glide and only provide bursts of propulsion when needed. With the blending of the future glider technology, the range of GA aircraft could be seriously extended. ATC is not static either, though it is the FAA.. You could imagine an entirely flexible ATC system that would allow for these glider like, bobbing and weaving routes.

Even if you are unwilling to envision an overlap of GA with gliding, you might concede that the two types of flying could become very similar. The result for us would be the same, the loss of the our identity, the loss of our sport.

XC

You can never say never - well, almost never. ;-)

It's also impossible to predict what will become of glider racing in a world where you, for instance, almost never need to stop and thermal as a result of improvements in materials, aerodynamics, dynamic soaring and even variometers, flight computers and sensors. The thought of not grinding around as much in the heat and humidity, getting vertigo and dehydrated certainly appeals. Many people marvel at and quite like the cruising of lift lines that has come with the latest technologies in hardware and software. I'd hate to preclude it before it gets here. The increases in speeds and distances could be astonishing.

The part that I am most skeptical about is that the pilot will become irrelevant. It's just way too dynamic and varied an environment to leave to even a supercomputer with deep learning algorithms, access to all the boundary layer weather models and every single bit of real-time data we can capture. I see the micro-level forecasting models getting better faster than any predictions of what you can glean from 1-second samples of gliders position, course and speed. That information you'll be able to download before launch..

Yes, we may face a different range of differentiation in competitor performance as the sport evolves. Back when I first started racing and there were only assigned tasks (Sean Fidler - you missed it!) we had a lot more landouts, a lot more scatter in the scores and a lot more randomness I think most would argue. Less randomness and more finishers keep more good pilots in the hunt which is good. It should surprise no one that the general ordering of the scoresheet doesn't change very much over years (or decades!) altered only by the exceptional new talent, retirement and the occasional old dog who learns new tricks (usually by flying A LOT). Anxiety that some skateboarding kid with Xbox gaming as his main racing credential will snake us all out of our medallions is misplaced. But should that come to pass - well, we can take it up then. I for one would like to see a few more kids give up Xbox gaming for glider racing and I am heartened by some small gains in junior soaring - including a talented trio in Australia right now!