On Saturday, November 28, 2015 at 11:15:23 AM UTC-8, wrote:

The initial thought I had at Uvalde is the he probably had his head down adjusting the scale on his PDA as he went into (out of) the turn. This is just speculation but it truly was what we were thinking on that day.


We'll never know what Chris was doing and I'm loathe to get too much deeper into a painful memory in this discussion. I did talk to the other pilot, who's a friend, at great length - it's in the Soaring article on Flarm from 2014. Suffice it to say at least one person was looking and scanning pretty hard. It's a very challenging visual problem for humans - we weren't bred to pick these kinds of thing up.


Andy, you're really overselling this. I never said I was in favor of more land outs, just that pilots should not be able to artificially increase their achieved speeds by routinely using other people's thermals which are conveniently labeled with climb rates.


I've always just been looking for the scenario that is being solved for. Either there will be more landouts from missed saves or there's not much benefit being generated. If I accept your point but assume zero incremental landouts, just that one course line might have a superior climb in it and some other line might not. First, that's one scoop skill, one scoop local knowledge and one scoop dumb luck). I wager for the non-random part it benefits different pilots on different days by a minute or two - or 8-14 points on the days when it works. So you're up 8 one day, no benefit three other days and down 14 another day for minus 6 points net at the end of a week. It's so far down in the noise of random events at a contest that the signal to noise ratio isn't even measurable. Add to that the fact that pilots who systematically take other people's thermals rather than their own generate about 10-15% slower climbs on average (actual data from suspected leech-heavy contests). At the end of the contest you end up with people who try to use Flarm to follow being down several hundred points for having been a sucker - not counting any other shortcomings they may have.

I'm fine with deleting climb rates, I find them useless anyway, they are snapshots with no total energy - I normally pick up the pullup (+10 its or so), followed by a lot of randomness.


Everyone should count out loud 10 seconds as a worse case scenario and see if it enough time to avoid a glider or a formation of gliders while looking outside your glider. I think it is. If folks want to go back in forth between outside and your cockpit display and analyze things then they are going to get caught looking in the wrong place.

Should be fine. Hope it'll be fine - until you see the other guy in quartering trail behind the alarm target or realize the target glider turned right just as you turned left. It's hard to pick that up on the display (do you look out the canopy or down at the display to sort that out?) at one update per second so you need a couple of updates to see where he went - or you try to pick him up by looking in that direction, but your odds of seeing him in time are about 50/50 - from FAA and NTSB experimental studies.

The suggestion is to have some range so you avoid collision courses all together rather than waiting for them to happen.

Yes these are small probabilities of horrific events - but that was the whole point of Flarm in the first place. Part of the reason why stealth mode "works just fine" is that flying without Flarm works just fine even if you don't look out the window - almost all the time.

I'll surely fly in a stealth mandated contest if there is no reasonable alternative, but I've been finding the less restricted OLC/XC events pretty enjoyable too and it will certainly affect my choice of mix. That's just me. The poll would indicate more pilots are not fond of stealth than are fond of stealth.9q1

9B