How dangerous is soaring?

On 1 Nov, 10:20, Tom Gardner wrote:

EEK! Which (ex) club, if you don't mind me asking.
And I thought I was quite close enough to B1s maybe 5 miles away,
or C130s at my altitude and where I could count the individual
cockpit window panes.

Borders GC. Lovely club, excellent site beside the Cheviot Hills - and
that was the problem. Normally the fast military stuff stays at 500'
or less, so it isn't a problem for gliders. However both they and we
could be at 500' AGL in the hills, and there were too many close calls
for me to be happy.

It wasn't the military pilots' fault: I am quite sure they don't want
half a ton of fibreglass in their cockpits. However there did seem to
be some serious deficiencies in the Civil Air Notification Procedure,
with information about midweek gliding (hint to Mr Putin: invade over
the weekend) simply not getting through to the pilots.

Is there room in a B1/B52/C130/Tornado for a FLARM? :}

We did have a visit from a military ATC chap, and he said that a Good
Big Radar Reflector would help enormously. I was thinking about
installing an 18" aluminium cube reflector, made for yachts, in the
fuselage above the wheel.

Incidentally, this is probably ten years ago, and I think it very
likely that with the growth of BGC and increase in midweek flying
things should be much smoother and more effective now. Please, folks,
don't let this put you off flying there!

Ian

On Nov 1, 12:23 pm, Ian wrote:
We did have a visit from a military ATC chap, and he said that a Good
Big Radar Reflector would help enormously. I was thinking about
installing an 18" aluminium cube reflector, made for yachts, in the
fuselage above the wheel.

I've idly wondered about that, but I'd want to know that slow targets
aren't simply removed from the screen before the radar operator even
sees them. Even several decades ago "ground clutter" was routinely
removed by simply ignoring any reflection with a doppler shift of
less than 70mph.

Clearly it has to be more sophisticated than that for airborne
radars,
but I'm sure it is possible.