Is FLARM helpful?

At 21:29 25 November 2015, jfitch wrote:
I am curious about your experience with the interface. Did you just have
the BF display, or was the Flarm also displaying targets on a moving
map?

I have not had any Flarm warnings that would have saved a midair (3
years
with it now). But I have always had Flarm targets displayed on the glide
computer moving map, and so nearly always see them long before they
could be
considered a threat. Two times in those three years I have gotten an
unexpected warning, though not close enough to require action to avoid
collision.
I use those events as a learning experience to see how I need to change
my
scans and operations, so that they do not happen again.

From this I conclude that the situational awareness, far away from an
potential conflict, is more valuable for preventing potential conflicts in

the
first place than the actual warning facility.=20

Countless times that Flarm has identified and displayed glider within a
km
of me that I had not seen and might never have seen.

I have used only the 'butterfly' display. To be clear, of course I am
seeing target alerts all the time. That is not a problem, and even
occasionally interesting (such as when someone starts following).
The problem is with false collision warnings. Many pilots appear to (and
some of my pupils certainly do) find it almost impossible to resist turning

away from the Flarm direction of the 'threat', before they have seen the
target. That is dangerous, as I wrote in a post yesterday. And note that
the Flarm direction is often significantly different from the true
direction
(occasionally diametrically opposite), as it is track-based, not heading-
based.

I can see that my experience of Flarm in a very busy environment (the
French Alps) will be very different from that of those flying largely in
isolation (such as flatlands, particularly with what I would regard as high

cloudbases (I'm a Brit!))
J.