I doubt if any of our top pilots would resort to that. Can you imagine the shame associated with such an action? We can argue here all day I just don't believe that 99% of contest pilots in the USA would do such a thing. The 1% that would do will probably not achieve much in a long run anyway if that person needs to cheat to succeed. Somehow the top pilots can win no matter what. They were winning before Flarm and they are winning with Flarm. Some, I will not name here don't have Flarm and they still win.

Maybe we should look for a solution and stop this back end forth.

Hi Andrzej, Not sure if you are responding to my post, but just in case you are, let me say again: I don't care about leeching. I don't care if someone wins by leeching. I don't care if someone wins a world championship by leeching with Flarm, Mark I Eyeball, or machine vision (google "optical collision avoidance). Competitive advantage was not the point of my last post. The point is: Given incentive to do so, there will be pilots who will suppress their Flarm output to deny competitors tactical information. In doing so, they put the rest of us at risk. I have no idea how much of a risk that is or will be. However, the people who developed Flarm wrote "We do not recommend the use of Stealth mode, but it is better than turning FLARM(R) off for tactical reasons." (See S.Fidler's post that started this thread). They were concerned about the issue enough to write that. I happen to think they are correct.

I concur that we should look for a solution. Given Flarm or similar equipment, the best solution, in my opinion, is a competition mode that presents no incentive to suppress Flarm output. In the longer run, passive collision avoidance tech, such as machine vision systems, may provide a better solution.