US Competition Pilot Poll and Election

On Tuesday, October 4, 2016 at 6:51:19 PM UTC-7, jfitch wrote:

Interesting that the question about FLARM is inherently biased against. This is a textbook case of asking a question while begging a specific response. The question is something like "Did focusing your attention on FLARM cause a loss of situational awareness..." I consider it far more likely that focusing my attention on FLARM increased my situational awareness and said so in the comments.

A more appropriate wording would be, "Considering the information provided by, and the attention required by the FLARM display, how did use of FLARM affect your overall situational awareness?" This is much closer to a neutral question. But we know where the hearts of the writers lie.....


You should have seen the first draft... :-)

I agree your wording is more neutral. The comment box was provided specifically for the type of elaboration you make here. Feel free to fill it up. It will get read and summarized.

We already know that Flarm map-type displays help overall situational awareness a lot, so on average we are better off for having them. We don't really need to poll on that. What this question is mostly about is any potential secondary effects, including specific examples of how they come about. It wasn't clear in the drafting process that totally neutral wording would get anything other than answers about the primary as opposed to secondary effects. With more effort we might have come up with a less provocative phrasing that still fits the objective - feedback noted.

Since the introduction of flight computers - heck, variometers too, people have worried about "head in the cockpit" disease. In this case your head in the cockpit looking as something that sees better than you do ought to be a good thing most of the time. Most of the time isn't necessarily all of the time so we're asking about what probably would be very rare situations, but worth getting some data about.

9B