Help us with this petition for security on anti-collision systems

On Friday, May 22, 2015 at 9:33:48 PM UTC+1, wrote:
"Well said Wolf. It's not a win-win situation. Simply said Flarm uses its dominant position to try to make more money. Business decision. What is wrong is that someone ask to have Flarm on board. They should ask an anti collision system based on a protocol certified by a third party (IGC???)"

That would be fair enough - if (and its a big if) the IGC had established both a communication protocol and (crucially) a collision prediction algorithm tailored for gliders that they were prepared to continually develop and update - then it would have been perfectly logical for those to be made open to all developers. That is a route that could have been taken but it is extremely unlikely that a body such as the IGC could have had the idea, the means and the will to have done so. In the real world it was done commercially and there are 25,000 Flarm units already installed and you have simply missed the boat. Many of those will be in club gliders and many others in syndicated gliders so a very conservative estimate would be 50,000+ pilots flying using Flarm at present. 500 supporting the petition is probably about 1% of the number of users. It would be very interesting to know how many of those signing the petition are actually current Flarm users.

Your petition only mentions the communication protocols. Flarm is both the communication protocol plus the collision warning algorithm. For the rest of us who have already paid for, and are using, Flarm the prospect of competing systems has no gain and increases the possibility of incompatible warning algorithms.

John Galloway