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.

Just so we do not get too high on our horse, I recently became aware (and check 4 sale adds on W&W) many gliders DO NOT have power Flarm. One pilot was just asking about renting a unit for the Standard Class Nationals, as he was not ready to buy yet! When i was flying powered aircraft, I had an S-mode transponder and Sandel HSI which helped point out traffic, on many occasions I was glad and I paid the money At that time TCAS was about $30,000.. I am not a firm believer in the "Big Sky" theory, from personal experience swapping paint, and several Very near misses while both myself and the other aircraft were under positive control, twice at an airport, Santa Barbra and Torrence.

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 7:23:43 AM UTC-7, Ramy wrote:
Indeed most GA never heard of PowerFlarm.
The soaring community is obviously ahead of power pilots with collision avoidance technology, and the reason is that we took the matter in our own hands and did not wait for the FAA to protect us. It is too bad that most GA is still depending on See and Avoid when the technology exists for more than a decade!

Ramy

That's still true. But I have always found ATC to be quite vigilant in reporting traffic with flight following or IFR in VMC, if not necessarily providing collision avoidance vectors. They do still get radar alerts if you have a TXP, and sometimes primary targets. One time flying 500' offshore Monterey bay at 500' in a citabria, what was then called Monterey Approach called to tell me that there was a primary target my altitude 1 mile, "but it could be an 18-wheeler on Highway 1."