Midair Warning

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 1:18:17 PM UTC-5, Darryl Ramm wrote:
On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 8:00:12 AM UTC-7, wrote:
There is much more wrong with the Power Flarm comment.
I have Flarm.
Transponder targets do not provide the information that Flarm targets have.
One has to actually visually search for the transponder target.
At the speeds the F-16 was travelling....Flarm is iffy.

The Flarm part of this thread is going a bit off the rails. PowerFLARM is not targeted at GA use (certainly not in the USA), for very good reasons. Well maybe the few GA aircraft that should have PowerFLARM are tow planes.

AFAIK the F-16C is not equipped with 1090ES Out, it is equipped with a very capable military/IFF transponder that supports Mode S and will show up as a PCAS alert on a PowerFLARM... given all the usual requirements like the transponder the F16 would need to be being interrogated etc. If the USAF eventually equips their fighters with 1090ES out then a PowerFLARM would provide much more useful warning (surprise! cost and complexity of installing ADS-B out affects the military as well).

PCAS is just not a very effective warning against a fast jet like an F-16 (even if flying 250 knots), you have no clue what direction the treat is in, you may not get much warning time, the jets may maneuver rapidly vertical (outside of the PCAs warning box), they are camouflaged, small and and difficult to see. There are ADS-B based options that a GA aircraft could deploy that would (via TIS-B) better show the F-16 traffic (but they also are not perfect), but the cost and hassle of installing those is likely not appealing to many lower-end GA aircraft owners.

Flarm does not need to be "raised to the FAA's attention".. the FAA is well aware of what Flarm is, including the FAA folks who worked on the recent TABS TSO. The soaring community would seriously harm it's reputation by proposing PowerFLARM for use in GA aircraft, it is just not suitable for that, not in the unique USA ADS-B market. FLARM certainly knows that and is not marketing the product for GA users in the USA. And likewise transponder and ADS-B solutions are not suitable for use in gliders for glider-glider traffic awareness. Unfortunately we are stuck in that space spanning two worlds and for some glider owners/pilots that means, and will increasingly mean, equipping with both PowerFLARM and a transponder and maybe other parts of the ADS-B puzzle (like possibly TABS if that takes off).

I totally agree with your assessment of the limited value of PCAS for high speed collision threats like F-16s.

Assuming that this Cessna was within range of an ADS-B ground station, a low cost ADS-B solution (both IN and OUT) connected to an iPhone or iPAD app like ForeFlight could have given the Cessna pilots a good warning of the traffic that was heading straight towards them.

Hopefully the new FAA interest in low cost ADS-B based beacon technology will result in some serious cost reductions, so that this technology is affordable by everyone.