Mechanical Vario

On Sep 28, 11:44 pm, Bob Whelan
wrote:
Personally, I think the Gospel of Simplicity ought to be preached more,
because so much of soaring does not REQUIRE the latest in bells and
whistles be present in order for fledglings to begin spreading their
wings in personally gratifying and safe ways. Flight (in any form)
costs more than remaining groundbound. Soaring flight as a niche
certainly isn't cheap (in time or money or mental effort required), and
any barriers (real or imagined) to achieving it are precisely that:
barriers. I don't think soaring participants should be promoting Mark
CXXIV widgets as a universal good, or worse, as necessary, to everyone
getting into the sport.

Couldn't agree more - hence my comment that technology peaked with the
B40 :-).

I'm not a big fan of slavishly following the vario when cruising -
there's a lot of evidence that there's little to be gained in terms of
overall XC speed. In fact there's a very good chance that by the time
you've slowed up, you're in sink, and by the time you've accelerated,
you're in lift. A glider doing 70 knots is travelling at ~30 m/s -
allow for the seconds of the vario reacting, the pilot reacting, and
the glider responding to your control inputs and you'll have travelled
an easy 100 m - that is, you're effectively reacting to air that's 100
m behind you. Which probably won't be doing the same thing as the air
you're now in.

What's much more important in terms of XC speed is climbing fast - and
to do that you need an accurate, well set-up vario. Mechanicals suck
on that score, and as Mike says, they often take the fancy kit with
them unless they've been set up by an expert.

BTW, on the gust issue, there is another solution (though not nearly
as elegant as the rotating TE probe) - accelerometers. The Vega by
Triadis uses them for gust filtering, but I've not heard of any pilot
reports.


Dan