Meeting to discuss FLARM in the USA

On 26 Oct, 18:18, Ramy wrote:
On Oct 26, 9:07 am, Ian wrote:
SNIP

[1] and have no intention of doing so: I'm profoundly sceptical about
a further increase in the number of things to fiddle with and focus on
inside the glider. Why not just look out?

Because your human eyes can't detect most threats on time to avoid it,
especially gliders and especially if they are comming from behind or
the side.

The pilots of these gliders should be able to see me - if they are not
busy concentrating on yet another electronic gadget in the cockpit.
Anyway, my human eyes have successfully detected /all/ threats in time
to avoid them so far. How common are midair glider collisions?


Ian

On Oct 27, 11:40 pm, Ian wrote:
On 26 Oct, 18:18, Ramy wrote:

On Oct 26, 9:07 am, Ian wrote:
SNIP

Anyway, my human eyes have successfully detected /all/ threats in time
to avoid them so far. How common are midair glider collisions?

Ian

How do you know what you have detected *all* threats in time. What
margin of safety is that down to? How do you know other aircraft (and/
or ATC) did not take action to avoid you and you were never aware of
them? I personally do not use logic like "my past landing attempt did
not kill me so my landings are great" but I look at what you are
saying as "I've not run into anything sofar therefore my visual
lookouts are perfectly adequate" - it is not a high threshold for
fidelity in this discussion, especially when you appreciate how much
the big sky is actually part of being responsible for you still being
alive. Do you routinely do clearing turns while cruising along to
clear all those large blind spots we have? How clear of clouds do you
really stay? How do you see fast traffic about to come out the cloud?
Have you ever seen how really hard it is to see a white glider closing
at over 100 knots head on against snow laden white mountainous
background?

Go fly in an aircraft with a TCAS or PCAS or similar and see how much
general traffic you don't spot until the system warns you to really
look or (carefully) turn the aircraft so you can see traffic. Flying
with a PCAS in my gliders has warned me a few times to start looking
intensely for traffic (much more than you would be able to do
continuously as a part of standard traffic scanning). The few closest
ones have been power traffic, in uncontrolled but high density traffic
areas some close and very oblivious to my glider being there at all.
From what I've seen the adoption of PCAS units like the Zaon MRX are
very viral. Lots of non believers until one or two glider pilots start
using them and then start reporting they really work, especially all
the traffic they otherwise would not notice...

Oh yes I've deliberately not stuck to Flarm, and I think Flarm would
be a very bad move for the USA. We need gliders in high traffic areas
with Transponders and PCAS today and ADS-B in future. Too many of us
fly in very high traffic areas, we need to be visible to and
communicating with power traffic and ATC as well as worrying about
glider-glider conflicts. Politically I am much more worried about a
glider taking out a passenger jet than I am about glider-glider
collisions. The last person who wanted to argue with me strongly that
mid-air collisions do not happen was flying with me in a Duo Discus
near Minden when not far away the ASG-29 met with a Hawker. Hell of a
way to win an argument.

Darryl

On 28 Oct, 07:18, "
wrote:
On Oct 27, 11:40 pm, Ian wrote:

On 26 Oct, 18:18, Ramy wrote:

On Oct 26, 9:07 am, Ian wrote:
SNIP
Anyway, my human eyes have successfully detected /all/ threats in time
to avoid them so far. How common are midair glider collisions?

How do you know what you have detected *all* threats in time.

Because nobody has ever hit me. Therefore I and/or the other pilots
have /always/ managed to detect and deal with threats successfully.

What
margin of safety is that down to?

Can you define "margin of safety" in this case, please?

How do you know other aircraft (and/
or ATC) did not take action to avoid you and you were never aware of
them?

It doesn't really matter to me whether I successfully avoided them or
they successfully avoided me (that will almost certainly have happened
a lot, as I fly wood) - but I can say that "looking out" has always
worked for me. That's not to get complacent, of course, but I would
feel a lot happier if I knew that other pilots were not, to some
inevitable extent, relying on a magic gadget to lookout for them.

I personally do not use logic like "my past landing attempt did
not kill me so my landings are great" but I look at what you are
saying as "I've not run into anything sofar therefore my visual
lookouts are perfectly adequate"

How about "unless you buy a radio altimeter you will never be able to
plan an outlanding properly?"

Lots of non believers until one or two glider pilots start
using them and then start reporting they really work, especially all
the traffic they otherwise would not notice...

This is where I am sceptical. Yes, I am sure these things will give
lots of extra alerts - they'd hardly be worth buying if they didn't.
But we are not exactly plagued, world wide, by glider-glider
collisions, are we? So what this means is that pilots will spend a lot
more time reacting to false alarms (they must be false, because if
they weren't they'd end in a collision without the magic gadgets).

Do pilots have time available to do that? What are they not going to
do instead?

I can see a far stronger argument for using these things in areas
where other aircraft will not be looking out - Class A airspace, say,
or cloud flying, or scud running. But for normal flying ... colour me
unconvinced. That's only unconvinced yet, though. I'm not a complete
luddite. GPS sets are great - they may distract pilots' attention from
more important stuff, but not nearly as much as maps do. If flarm and
the like lead to a statistically significant reduction in the number
of midair collisions I'll be all for 'em.

Ian

Ian wrote:
On 26 Oct, 18:18, Ramy wrote:
On Oct 26, 9:07 am, Ian wrote:
SNIP

[1] and have no intention of doing so: I'm profoundly sceptical about
a further increase in the number of things to fiddle with and focus on
inside the glider. Why not just look out?
Because your human eyes can't detect most threats on time to avoid it,
especially gliders and especially if they are comming from behind or
the side.

The pilots of these gliders should be able to see me - if they are not
busy concentrating on yet another electronic gadget in the cockpit.

You haven't flown with a FLARM, yet you keep saying this. Why do you
think they are "concentrating" on FLARM? From what I've read about it,
and from what users say, there is no "concentrating": you go about your
flying until it alerts you.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly
* "Transponders in Sailplanes" http://tinyurl.com/y739x4
* "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation" at www.motorglider.org

On 28 Oct, 14:53, Eric Greenwell wrote:
Ian wrote:

The pilots of these gliders should be able to see me - if they are not
busy concentrating on yet another electronic gadget in the cockpit.

You haven't flown with a FLARM, yet you keep saying this. Why do you
think they are "concentrating" on FLARM? From what I've read about it,
and from what users say, there is no "concentrating": you go about your
flying until it alerts you.

.... at which point, if I interpret the pictures at www.flarm.com
correctly, you have to look at the thing to get an idea of where it
thinks trouble is coming from, then work out of its real or not, then
work out what to do?

Ian

On Oct 28, 6:40 am, Ian wrote:
How common are midair glider collisions?

http://glidemet.co.uk/?p=414


Dan

On Oct 26, 4:07 pm, Ian wrote:
I have never used it myself [1] but I was chatting about it just a few
days ago with an instructor at a busy ridge site here. His view was
that it's a menace: it generates far too many false alarms, and pilots
who try to evade non-existent hazards may thereby cause significant
danger. What are you supposed to do, he asked, if you get a six-second-
t-death warning about a glider which is supposedly dead ahead but
which you can't see? He reckoned the main problem was that the system
only believes in "cruising" and "thermalling" and gets hopelessly
confused by the turn at the end of a beat on the ridge.

Sounds like you're talking about the SGU trial at Portmoak (or at
least, that's the same as the opinion of one vocal instructor there -
whether or not those are the conclusions the SGU arrive at themselves
remains to be seen). They fly a rather short ridge (only a few km)
which is not representative of normal glider operations - not sure
that their findings, when published, can be extrapolated beyond their
own circumstances.

Lasham, by contrast, did find that Flarm met their needs (no doubt
partly motivated by the fatal collision there in 2004). They're a flat-
land thermal site - probably the busiest in the UK. I think the fact
that their entire fleet (some thirty gliders and tugs) has been fitted
with Flarm, and that many more units are being fitted to the private
fleet there, is a strong endorsement.


Dan

On 28 Oct, 23:24, Dan G wrote:

Lasham, by contrast, did find that Flarm met their needs (no doubt
partly motivated by the fatal collision there in 2004). They're a flat-
land thermal site - probably the busiest in the UK. I think the fact
that their entire fleet (some thirty gliders and tugs) has been fitted
with Flarm, and that many more units are being fitted to the private
fleet there, is a strong endorsement.

I note the point. Lasham, however, does sometimes seem to be a
slightly faddy place. It's not that long ago that they were telling us
all that motor gliders were the only way to do ab-initio training.

Are they making flarm mandatory for all private gliders on site?

Ian

On Oct 29, 6:02 pm, Ian wrote:
I note the point. Lasham, however, does sometimes seem to be a
slightly faddy place. It's not that long ago that they were telling us
all that motor gliders were the only way to do ab-initio training.

Yes, and they once claimed to have trained to someone to solo standard
on a simulator. Not heard of it since. However the loss of Alan
Purnell in a mid-air in 2004 must be a strongly motivating factor. He
was a very experienced pilot and instructor - but that's not always
enough.

Are they making flarm mandatory for all private gliders on site?

No, in fact the take-up rate in the private fleet seems quite low. I
think a lot of people are waiting for the IGC-approved Flarm to come
out. But I do know of other gliders based elsewhere (e.g. two at
Dunstable) which are now Flarm-equipped because Lasham's move has jump-
started the market in the UK.


Dan

Dan G wrote:
On Oct 26, 4:07 pm, Ian wrote:
I have never used it myself [1] but I was chatting about it just a few
days ago with an instructor at a busy ridge site here. His view was
that it's a menace: it generates far too many false alarms, and pilots
who try to evade non-existent hazards may thereby cause significant
danger. What are you supposed to do, he asked, if you get a six-second-
t-death warning about a glider which is supposedly dead ahead but
which you can't see? He reckoned the main problem was that the system
only believes in "cruising" and "thermalling" and gets hopelessly
confused by the turn at the end of a beat on the ridge.

Sounds like you're talking about the SGU trial at Portmoak (or at
least, that's the same as the opinion of one vocal instructor there -
whether or not those are the conclusions the SGU arrive at themselves
remains to be seen). They fly a rather short ridge (only a few km)
which is not representative of normal glider operations - not sure
that their findings, when published, can be extrapolated beyond their
own circumstances.

Lasham, by contrast, did find that Flarm met their needs (no doubt
partly motivated by the fatal collision there in 2004). They're a flat-
land thermal site - probably the busiest in the UK. I think the fact
that their entire fleet (some thirty gliders and tugs) has been fitted
with Flarm, and that many more units are being fitted to the private
fleet there, is a strong endorsement.

Only flown there once and the weather was lousy, but I would hardly call those
things thermals ;-)

Dan