PowerFLARM leeching comments

On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 1:59:35 PM UTC-4, Mike the Strike wrote:
I sometimes wonder if the Rules Committee lives on a different planet from the rest of us!



There is no way in hell that any contest director in the USA would mandate the use of stealth mode on an anti-collision system if this reduces its usefulness even the teeniest bit. In the event of a collision, insurance companies looking to minimize their exposure through subrogation would hold the CD at least partially responsible for the accident - spreading the cost to his or the contest's insurer. This might not be an issue in the rest of the world, but is sure is here in the USA.


No sensible person would ever mandate stealth mode here!


Mike

Mike,

I dunno - I consider myself reasonably sensible. Despite that, I recently agreed to CD an SSA Regional contest; okay, so maybe I'm not that sensible :-)

I would certainly consider it... if it were shown to be properly implemented such that the conflict resolution advisories were in no way impacted. By comparison, we used to force people to dive at redline through a gate and encourage people to fly marginal final glides to a 50 foot gate. Yet, "sensible people" routinely did this.

Right now, it's all premature, as others have pointed out. Once the range and reception issues are ironed out and adoption becomes more-or-less universal, then I think there will be added incentive for display manufacturers to invest heavily in "leeching support". I'd be willing to be that one of the unintended consequences would be increased gaggling on weak blue days. But, we'll just have to see, won't we.

And no Dave, I don't believe that European experience tells us much...yet. When someone starts moving from dots and beeps to heat-maps of glider concentrations and otherwise presenting data into a format that's easily consumable by the pilots (not to mention FLARM-next-gen, with greater range and reliability, which someone will surely develop in the coming 10 years), then I think there will be some hard choices to be made.

And FWIW, I overheard one pilot at Region IV mention that he turned off his transponder just to avoid leaching. Now that's not what we want, is it? So, in a competitive environment, one can never predict exactly how people are going to behave... remember gliders loaded to way above max gross with water and lead bars taped to the spars?

P3