The truth about Flarm Stealth and Competition definition...

On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 8:57:50 PM UTC-5, Andrzej Kobus wrote:
"I feel that the "current proposed SSA RC competition mode" is a decent compromise for the peeps that want more safety, but also limits some of the possible tactical advantage of "full open Flarm". "

Can you point me to specifications of this so called "competition" mode? What vapor ware are you talking about? The only thing that was voted on was "stealth" mode.

Let's stick to facts not wishes.

In other posts, opening up the range to 5KM, looks like most other items of "US Stealth" are kept. This keeps within some of "current" (March 2015 by Flarm, unlike undated document linked by Sean Fidler regarding "competition mode") Flarm info regarding "under optimum range, 5KM is OK" but "may" exceed that in optimum conditions.

If you've kept up on a bit of this discussion (spread all over RAS), you would have seen this more than once......

I did......

On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 2:36:45 PM UTC-8, XC wrote:

9B,

Obviously you are trying to goad me on with that last comment. I'll bite.

Some of us still believe that looking at clouds and terrain, finding thermals yourself, is an important part of the sport. Throughout these threads this is still a lot of talk overstated talk about safety that is covering for what some folks really want, to buddy-fly their way around the race course.

BB has even said leading out is a losing strategy. Strange, champions of the past weren't afraid to lead out. Is this the way we are heading?

FLARM with stealth as it is now really works well in a contest setting for collision avoidance. Those who claim otherwise have largely never tried it and/or want (need) to see others to make their way around the race course.. Seems kind of weak-assed in my opinion.

Still waiting to hear what you think our sport should be about. You are on the RC. I'd like to know your vision on where we are going. What parts are essential to the sport?

Should we keep the part about not running a motor? Or should we allow folks to run their motors for 2 five minute periods? This would arguably be safer and those who maybe didn't get enough practice in could stay competitive on the score sheet longer. Still seems like an arbitrary limit, though.

I'd hate to limit engine technology. If we only allow 10 minutes of engine time they better count. I'd want to get some good performance out of my engine. All this too can be part of the undefined future of our sport.

XC

Hey Sean,

Wasn't trying to goad you particularly. It was more philosophical - but I know you're always up to the philosophical challenge.

My vision for the sport. Okay, pressure's on...

I think soaring competitions (or contests - note that I don't say "race", which is an important sub-part of the skills needed in soaring competition, but not the whole) should test a number of skills, all of which are related to the ability to make distance over the ground, primarily in a minimum amount of time, all without benefit of propulsion by means of stored energy (gasoline, electrons, rubber bands, nuclear reactors, etc.) and without proprietary assistance from others (that is, it needs to be your performance (philosophy on two-seaters will need its own thread).

While there are a wide array of skills that contribute to being good at achieving the above objective, I think the paramount skill is the ability to make optimal strategic and tactical decisions with complex information inputs under uncertainty. This boils down to two basic tenets. Tenet 1: Don't pick sub-par climbs and, Tenet 2: Don't get so low that you can't pick the thermal you want. Fundamentally, we are testing pilots' abilities to trade off these two tenets. In flight this boils down to two types of decisions, 1) which line will have the best energy and 2) should I stop and climb here or press on in hope of finding better lift (BB has written quite eloquently on the latter item in his "A little faster please" article - if you haven't, read it. It includes a lot on decisions about altitude and thermal lift distribution versus the "stop to climb" decision and upwind/downwind/crosswind starts and turnpoint decisions). In general, the more complex and varied the information inputs involved in testing that ability, the better and more accurate the test of soaring skills.

In constructing soaring competitions, they need to be subject to a constraint of fairness, which is: every pilot needs the same opportunity to make the same in-flight tradeoff decisions. Note that this does not necessarily mean that every pilot needs to make the exact same flight in a giant bomber formation. Now, some people will argue that if every glider isn't flying in exactly the same air at exactly the same time random and unpredictable differences in weather can make all the difference and that's all luck. I can sympathize and understand this perspective and agree that some poorly thought through logic can end up looking pretty clever if the unexpected happens weather-wise, but generally I think better pilots are better at reading the weather and integrating macro and micro level forecasts and weather clues into their decision-making. This to me is an important skill that comes into play whether your rage of course line flexibility is 5 miles or 50 miles.

There is an element of risk tolerance that figures into all of this that I personally think needs to go so far but no further in terms of contests encouraging or accepting "bet your life" or "bet your glider" decisions. A significant amount of risk is inevitable, but I don't see willingness to take on risk - or belief that you can pull off risky decisions when others can't or won't - as a skill set we want to test for its own sake. I don't think we should try to eliminate every landout or risk of landout no matter what. There is plenty of time to be lost just by taking a 2 knot thermal instead of a 4-knot thermal and pilots will press for the better climb as their comfort-level dictates. But ensuring that a pilot at 1000' desperate for a climb has to put into a field doesn't do anything to improve how we judge soaring performance, in fact every landout just complicates matters because we have to translate miles to miles per hour (or more exactly translate both to points with formulas that arbitrarily weight the two metrics differently). If we can't compare performance exactly then it undermines the validity of the results. We tolerate this because we have to - landouts are inevitable but the ideal goal would be to challenge pilots' decision-making skills to the maximum without having to figure out how many points a mike is worth..

So what are the skills we want to test? My view (in order of importance):

1) Ability to make decisions about the optimal path to fly to achieve the best speed over the course - this can include small deviations to maximize energy, places to look for lift based on terrain, clouds or other indicators (like gliders or raptors climbing) and macro decisions about where to go when task flexibility is greater (as in AAT and MAT formats).

2) Ability to best estimate how to make use of the available lift in terms of when to climb, when to press on, when to cruise or dolphin.

(I go back and forth on the priority order between 1 and 2)

3) Ability to understand weather and how it affects likely task performance at the micro-level and macro-level both in terms of forecast weather and weather dynamics over the course of the day, including the ability to integrate new information as weather changes. Note that 3) interplays with 1) on many days.

4) Ability to extract the most energy out of lift sources. This includes thermalling technique, search technique, etc.

5) Stick skills - the ability to fly at the right speed, right flap setting, right bank angle, judge the final glide, not crash into a ridge, etc. I see these as table-stakes for flying, but not something we are trying to test explicitly. Leave that to the Red Bull racing pilots.

I'm sure there are other things I am forgetting so I reserve the right to revise my list.

So, how does this vision for the sport affect philosophy for technology like Flarm and ADS-B? They are at the simplest level another source of information that needs to be balanced against and integrated with other information inputs. More information puts more pressure on good decision-making ("go for the cu on course or the glider climbing a mile off course in the blue?" is a more complex decision than "go for the cu on course - it's all you've got").

Sure, some pilots may decide that they can latch onto others decisions and more Flarm range may give them more opportunity to try, but all the evidence is that if you are borrowing someone else'd decisions without even knowing what they are deciding it's very hard to perform well, except in some very narrow scope. There are just too many variables and they change way too dynamically to blindly follow and win most of the time. Even if it were possible to use more information about other gliders I don't believe this fundamentally changes the sport - other gliders are just more information. If it is true that you can win just by following then we are all fools not to fly the gaggle all the time, regardless of technology enablers. If we don't like the gaggle, we should change how we score and set up tasks (and maybe penalize leeching - it's pretty easy) rather than scapegoating technology. These practices pre- and post-date every technology shift. It's not about technology and technology doesn't significantly alter the balance - I looked for it.

I feel the same way about weather data - so long as we confirm that it is reasonably available to all at affordable cost. It gives more information for complex tradeoff decisions rather than flying blindly. Why flying blindly is viewed as a skill totally escapes me. Guts to press into a thunderstorm without knowing what's ahead? It's not a "skill" I think soaring contests should be testing.

Hope that's a decent start at a reply.

9B
Andy Blackburn
RC "Revolutionary"

XC

For what it's worth, some of us genuinely just want to be a little safer. THat's all. I couldn't give a continental poo about leaching, I never could.... Probably why I've never been all that high in the rankings. I just want to fly occasionally with friends, learn a little more about soaring... Oh yeah, and minimize the probability of dying because I hit someone in midair.

If that makes me a weak-assed... Well, anything, then that's what I am.

But at the very least, please, accept that some people genuinely just think that compromising a safety device to be "strong assed" is... Well, dumb. Sorry Sean, but I'll take "weak assed" over "dumb" any day. You, of course, are welcome to take the other side.

On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 7:15:36 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 2:36:45 PM UTC-8, XC wrote:

9B,
9B
Andy Blackburn
RC "Revolutionary"

Andy,

The best reply I've read so far!

I've been reading the thread(s) and thinking about the "race" versus "contest" definitions.

Historically, if we want to go there, it is not about racing in a single line to a turnpoint and then on to the next. We have seen many of the "historical" races where two competitors fly from turnpoint to turnpoint and are not following the same line. The famous AJ Smith/ Geroge Moffat race on the last day of the 1969 National (a traditional race if there ever was one) where George goes left and AJ goes straight, show that the contest is about decision making and meteorological perceptions.

Except for the Grand Prix style (which SF loves so much) we almost never follow closely to other gliders and one a line where every glider is in the same air. If that makes it unfair so be it. That's what the CONTEST is all about.

Mike (when I race I chose my own line)

Well, I've now deleted two posts where I got overly irritated at Sean for his "weak assed" comments and insinuations that those of us who are concerned about safety aren't really, we're just not "real men" and can't fly without help. Sheesh Sean!

And then comes along Andy Blackburn with an eloquent, well written, logical argument that makes any continuation of those sorts of "I'm tougher than you", "you're a wimp and I'm a real man", hopefully look as weak as they are.. Thank you, Andy. I haven't met you (I don't think), but look forward to doing so.

And for what it's worth, I personally couldn't care less about leaching. Or about winning a contest - and I suspect there are a lot like me. I get to fly 1 or 2 contests a year because of my job. One of my main aims is to maximize the chance of leaving that contest alive. It's yet another group that I hope the RC considers - us amateurs who do this not for the glory, not for the hope of standing on some wooden pedestal holding a tin trophy, but for the fun of hanging out, safely, with our friends. Pretty weak-assed, but there it is.

I still remember an elderly gentleman (no longer with us) missing me by about 20 feet some 17 years ago at Newcastle as he went straight through my thermal at 100 mph. I swear I saw his eyes... And he still didn't see me as he went by. I'll fully admit that I was so focused on centering that I didn't see him coming either. Anything - absolutely anything - that I can do to not repeat that little bit of fun is great with me. And I suspect that if the same gentleman had a device that gave him 60 seconds warning, he'd still be searching around trying to find where the warning was coming from me as he smacked into me. A few minutes sounds a lot nicer to me than 60 seconds, thank you very much.

On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 10:15:36 PM UTC-5, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 2:36:45 PM UTC-8, XC wrote:

9B,

Obviously you are trying to goad me on with that last comment. I'll bite.

Some of us still believe that looking at clouds and terrain, finding thermals yourself, is an important part of the sport. Throughout these threads this is still a lot of talk overstated talk about safety that is covering for what some folks really want, to buddy-fly their way around the race course.

BB has even said leading out is a losing strategy. Strange, champions of the past weren't afraid to lead out. Is this the way we are heading?

FLARM with stealth as it is now really works well in a contest setting for collision avoidance. Those who claim otherwise have largely never tried it and/or want (need) to see others to make their way around the race course. Seems kind of weak-assed in my opinion.

Still waiting to hear what you think our sport should be about. You are on the RC. I'd like to know your vision on where we are going. What parts are essential to the sport?

Should we keep the part about not running a motor? Or should we allow folks to run their motors for 2 five minute periods? This would arguably be safer and those who maybe didn't get enough practice in could stay competitive on the score sheet longer. Still seems like an arbitrary limit, though.

I'd hate to limit engine technology. If we only allow 10 minutes of engine time they better count. I'd want to get some good performance out of my engine. All this too can be part of the undefined future of our sport.

XC

Hey Sean,

Wasn't trying to goad you particularly. It was more philosophical - but I know you're always up to the philosophical challenge.

My vision for the sport. Okay, pressure's on...

I think soaring competitions (or contests - note that I don't say "race", which is an important sub-part of the skills needed in soaring competition, but not the whole) should test a number of skills, all of which are related to the ability to make distance over the ground, primarily in a minimum amount of time, all without benefit of propulsion by means of stored energy (gasoline, electrons, rubber bands, nuclear reactors, etc.) and without proprietary assistance from others (that is, it needs to be your performance (philosophy on two-seaters will need its own thread).

While there are a wide array of skills that contribute to being good at achieving the above objective, I think the paramount skill is the ability to make optimal strategic and tactical decisions with complex information inputs under uncertainty. This boils down to two basic tenets. Tenet 1: Don't pick sub-par climbs and, Tenet 2: Don't get so low that you can't pick the thermal you want. Fundamentally, we are testing pilots' abilities to trade off these two tenets. In flight this boils down to two types of decisions, 1) which line will have the best energy and 2) should I stop and climb here or press on in hope of finding better lift (BB has written quite eloquently on the latter item in his "A little faster please" article - if you haven't, read it. It includes a lot on decisions about altitude and thermal lift distribution versus the "stop to climb" decision and upwind/downwind/crosswind starts and turnpoint decisions). In general, the more complex and varied the information inputs involved in testing that ability, the better and more accurate the test of soaring skills.

In constructing soaring competitions, they need to be subject to a constraint of fairness, which is: every pilot needs the same opportunity to make the same in-flight tradeoff decisions. Note that this does not necessarily mean that every pilot needs to make the exact same flight in a giant bomber formation. Now, some people will argue that if every glider isn't flying in exactly the same air at exactly the same time random and unpredictable differences in weather can make all the difference and that's all luck. I can sympathize and understand this perspective and agree that some poorly thought through logic can end up looking pretty clever if the unexpected happens weather-wise, but generally I think better pilots are better at reading the weather and integrating macro and micro level forecasts and weather clues into their decision-making. This to me is an important skill that comes into play whether your rage of course line flexibility is 5 miles or 50 miles.

There is an element of risk tolerance that figures into all of this that I personally think needs to go so far but no further in terms of contests encouraging or accepting "bet your life" or "bet your glider" decisions. A significant amount of risk is inevitable, but I don't see willingness to take on risk - or belief that you can pull off risky decisions when others can't or won't - as a skill set we want to test for its own sake. I don't think we should try to eliminate every landout or risk of landout no matter what. There is plenty of time to be lost just by taking a 2 knot thermal instead of a 4-knot thermal and pilots will press for the better climb as their comfort-level dictates. But ensuring that a pilot at 1000' desperate for a climb has to put into a field doesn't do anything to improve how we judge soaring performance, in fact every landout just complicates matters because we have to translate miles to miles per hour (or more exactly translate both to points with formulas that arbitrarily weight the two metrics differently). If we can't compare performance exactly then it undermines the validity of the results. We tolerate this because we have to - landouts are inevitable but the ideal goal would be to challenge pilots' decision-making skills to the maximum without having to figure out how many points a mike is worth.

So what are the skills we want to test? My view (in order of importance):

1) Ability to make decisions about the optimal path to fly to achieve the best speed over the course - this can include small deviations to maximize energy, places to look for lift based on terrain, clouds or other indicators (like gliders or raptors climbing) and macro decisions about where to go when task flexibility is greater (as in AAT and MAT formats).

2) Ability to best estimate how to make use of the available lift in terms of when to climb, when to press on, when to cruise or dolphin.

(I go back and forth on the priority order between 1 and 2)

3) Ability to understand weather and how it affects likely task performance at the micro-level and macro-level both in terms of forecast weather and weather dynamics over the course of the day, including the ability to integrate new information as weather changes. Note that 3) interplays with 1) on many days.

4) Ability to extract the most energy out of lift sources. This includes thermalling technique, search technique, etc.

5) Stick skills - the ability to fly at the right speed, right flap setting, right bank angle, judge the final glide, not crash into a ridge, etc. I see these as table-stakes for flying, but not something we are trying to test explicitly. Leave that to the Red Bull racing pilots.

I'm sure there are other things I am forgetting so I reserve the right to revise my list.

So, how does this vision for the sport affect philosophy for technology like Flarm and ADS-B? They are at the simplest level another source of information that needs to be balanced against and integrated with other information inputs. More information puts more pressure on good decision-making ("go for the cu on course or the glider climbing a mile off course in the blue?" is a more complex decision than "go for the cu on course - it's all you've got").

Sure, some pilots may decide that they can latch onto others decisions and more Flarm range may give them more opportunity to try, but all the evidence is that if you are borrowing someone else'd decisions without even knowing what they are deciding it's very hard to perform well, except in some very narrow scope. There are just too many variables and they change way too dynamically to blindly follow and win most of the time. Even if it were possible to use more information about other gliders I don't believe this fundamentally changes the sport - other gliders are just more information. If it is true that you can win just by following then we are all fools not to fly the gaggle all the time, regardless of technology enablers. If we don't like the gaggle, we should change how we score and set up tasks (and maybe penalize leeching - it's pretty easy) rather than scapegoating technology. These practices pre- and post-date every technology shift. It's not about technology and technology doesn't significantly alter the balance - I looked for it.

I feel the same way about weather data - so long as we confirm that it is reasonably available to all at affordable cost. It gives more information for complex tradeoff decisions rather than flying blindly. Why flying blindly is viewed as a skill totally escapes me. Guts to press into a thunderstorm without knowing what's ahead? It's not a "skill" I think soaring contests should be testing.

Hope that's a decent start at a reply.

9B
Andy Blackburn
RC "Revolutionary"

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I agree with almost everything you've said about priorities. Our two view points differ in one fundamental way that I can think of. I believe we should be measuring these same abilities with the pilot and glider taken as one system competing against and amongst other pilots. Pulling in more and more information from people outside the glider just means you are using their abilities. This homogenates not differentiates pilots abilities in my view.

You'll see as time goes on that people are talking more and more about the FLARM thermal values. When you hear this you know that the pilot was able to pick one thermal over another based on someone else's analysis of that thermal. They never had to size up the look of the cloud or sample the air that was already done for them, This is already happening.

Do you believe we should be able to talk to people on the ground during competitions? Serious question. Can I have an expert glider pilot with a bank of computers coach me through the flight? That would be an example of having more information to balance. I think that is nuts but they are all about it at the Worlds.

Enough on that now I have to respond to VW.

XC

On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 10:15:36 PM UTC-5, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 2:36:45 PM UTC-8, XC wrote:

9B,

Obviously you are trying to goad me on with that last comment. I'll bite.

Some of us still believe that looking at clouds and terrain, finding thermals yourself, is an important part of the sport. Throughout these threads this is still a lot of talk overstated talk about safety that is covering for what some folks really want, to buddy-fly their way around the race course.

BB has even said leading out is a losing strategy. Strange, champions of the past weren't afraid to lead out. Is this the way we are heading?

FLARM with stealth as it is now really works well in a contest setting for collision avoidance. Those who claim otherwise have largely never tried it and/or want (need) to see others to make their way around the race course. Seems kind of weak-assed in my opinion.

Still waiting to hear what you think our sport should be about. You are on the RC. I'd like to know your vision on where we are going. What parts are essential to the sport?

Should we keep the part about not running a motor? Or should we allow folks to run their motors for 2 five minute periods? This would arguably be safer and those who maybe didn't get enough practice in could stay competitive on the score sheet longer. Still seems like an arbitrary limit, though.

I'd hate to limit engine technology. If we only allow 10 minutes of engine time they better count. I'd want to get some good performance out of my engine. All this too can be part of the undefined future of our sport.

XC

Hey Sean,

Wasn't trying to goad you particularly. It was more philosophical - but I know you're always up to the philosophical challenge.

My vision for the sport. Okay, pressure's on...

I think soaring competitions (or contests - note that I don't say "race", which is an important sub-part of the skills needed in soaring competition, but not the whole) should test a number of skills, all of which are related to the ability to make distance over the ground, primarily in a minimum amount of time, all without benefit of propulsion by means of stored energy (gasoline, electrons, rubber bands, nuclear reactors, etc.) and without proprietary assistance from others (that is, it needs to be your performance (philosophy on two-seaters will need its own thread).

While there are a wide array of skills that contribute to being good at achieving the above objective, I think the paramount skill is the ability to make optimal strategic and tactical decisions with complex information inputs under uncertainty. This boils down to two basic tenets. Tenet 1: Don't pick sub-par climbs and, Tenet 2: Don't get so low that you can't pick the thermal you want. Fundamentally, we are testing pilots' abilities to trade off these two tenets. In flight this boils down to two types of decisions, 1) which line will have the best energy and 2) should I stop and climb here or press on in hope of finding better lift (BB has written quite eloquently on the latter item in his "A little faster please" article - if you haven't, read it. It includes a lot on decisions about altitude and thermal lift distribution versus the "stop to climb" decision and upwind/downwind/crosswind starts and turnpoint decisions). In general, the more complex and varied the information inputs involved in testing that ability, the better and more accurate the test of soaring skills.

In constructing soaring competitions, they need to be subject to a constraint of fairness, which is: every pilot needs the same opportunity to make the same in-flight tradeoff decisions. Note that this does not necessarily mean that every pilot needs to make the exact same flight in a giant bomber formation. Now, some people will argue that if every glider isn't flying in exactly the same air at exactly the same time random and unpredictable differences in weather can make all the difference and that's all luck. I can sympathize and understand this perspective and agree that some poorly thought through logic can end up looking pretty clever if the unexpected happens weather-wise, but generally I think better pilots are better at reading the weather and integrating macro and micro level forecasts and weather clues into their decision-making. This to me is an important skill that comes into play whether your rage of course line flexibility is 5 miles or 50 miles.

There is an element of risk tolerance that figures into all of this that I personally think needs to go so far but no further in terms of contests encouraging or accepting "bet your life" or "bet your glider" decisions. A significant amount of risk is inevitable, but I don't see willingness to take on risk - or belief that you can pull off risky decisions when others can't or won't - as a skill set we want to test for its own sake. I don't think we should try to eliminate every landout or risk of landout no matter what. There is plenty of time to be lost just by taking a 2 knot thermal instead of a 4-knot thermal and pilots will press for the better climb as their comfort-level dictates. But ensuring that a pilot at 1000' desperate for a climb has to put into a field doesn't do anything to improve how we judge soaring performance, in fact every landout just complicates matters because we have to translate miles to miles per hour (or more exactly translate both to points with formulas that arbitrarily weight the two metrics differently). If we can't compare performance exactly then it undermines the validity of the results. We tolerate this because we have to - landouts are inevitable but the ideal goal would be to challenge pilots' decision-making skills to the maximum without having to figure out how many points a mike is worth.

So what are the skills we want to test? My view (in order of importance):

1) Ability to make decisions about the optimal path to fly to achieve the best speed over the course - this can include small deviations to maximize energy, places to look for lift based on terrain, clouds or other indicators (like gliders or raptors climbing) and macro decisions about where to go when task flexibility is greater (as in AAT and MAT formats).

2) Ability to best estimate how to make use of the available lift in terms of when to climb, when to press on, when to cruise or dolphin.

(I go back and forth on the priority order between 1 and 2)

3) Ability to understand weather and how it affects likely task performance at the micro-level and macro-level both in terms of forecast weather and weather dynamics over the course of the day, including the ability to integrate new information as weather changes. Note that 3) interplays with 1) on many days.

4) Ability to extract the most energy out of lift sources. This includes thermalling technique, search technique, etc.

5) Stick skills - the ability to fly at the right speed, right flap setting, right bank angle, judge the final glide, not crash into a ridge, etc. I see these as table-stakes for flying, but not something we are trying to test explicitly. Leave that to the Red Bull racing pilots.

I'm sure there are other things I am forgetting so I reserve the right to revise my list.

So, how does this vision for the sport affect philosophy for technology like Flarm and ADS-B? They are at the simplest level another source of information that needs to be balanced against and integrated with other information inputs. More information puts more pressure on good decision-making ("go for the cu on course or the glider climbing a mile off course in the blue?" is a more complex decision than "go for the cu on course - it's all you've got").

Sure, some pilots may decide that they can latch onto others decisions and more Flarm range may give them more opportunity to try, but all the evidence is that if you are borrowing someone else'd decisions without even knowing what they are deciding it's very hard to perform well, except in some very narrow scope. There are just too many variables and they change way too dynamically to blindly follow and win most of the time. Even if it were possible to use more information about other gliders I don't believe this fundamentally changes the sport - other gliders are just more information. If it is true that you can win just by following then we are all fools not to fly the gaggle all the time, regardless of technology enablers. If we don't like the gaggle, we should change how we score and set up tasks (and maybe penalize leeching - it's pretty easy) rather than scapegoating technology. These practices pre- and post-date every technology shift. It's not about technology and technology doesn't significantly alter the balance - I looked for it.

I feel the same way about weather data - so long as we confirm that it is reasonably available to all at affordable cost. It gives more information for complex tradeoff decisions rather than flying blindly. Why flying blindly is viewed as a skill totally escapes me. Guts to press into a thunderstorm without knowing what's ahead? It's not a "skill" I think soaring contests should be testing.

Hope that's a decent start at a reply.

9B
Andy Blackburn
RC "Revolutionary"

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I agree with almost everything you've said about priorities. Our two view points differ in one fundamental way that I can think of. I believe we should be measuring these same abilities with the pilot and glider taken as one system competing against and amongst other pilots. Pulling in more and more information from people outside the glider just means you are using their abilities. This homogenizes not differentiates pilots abilities in my view.

You'll see as time goes on that people are talking more and more about the FLARM thermal values. When you hear this you know that the pilot was able to pick one thermal over another based on someone else's analysis of that thermal. They never had to size up the look of the cloud or sample the air that was already done for them, This is already happening.

Do you believe we should be able to talk to people on the ground during competitions? Serious question. Can I have an expert glider pilot with a bank of computers coach me through the flight? That would be an example of having more information to balance. I think that is nuts but they are all about it at the Worlds.

Enough on that now I have to respond to VW.

XC

I think the real point about STEALTH mode is still being missed. There
are now many users of FLARM, increasingly aircraft other than gliders
are fitting it. Here in the UK GA and the military are fitting it.

Competition pilots do not operate in an airspace bubble of their own,
they share the sky with pilots who are not flying in competitions. None
of these other gliders or aircraft would set STEALTH mode and could
be forgiven for thinking that they have the full features of FLARM. They
do not, if a glider has STEALTH mode set then all other users have only
the reduced features available.

If the setting of STEALTH mode only effected those flying in the
competition then it might be acceptable, provided ALL the pilots in the
competition agree to the reduction in safety margins. It is not about the
risks to competition pilots it is about the degraded service provided to
those not in competition who may not even know that they are
receiving a reduced service.

On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 11:10:42 PM UTC-5, Andrew Ainslie wrote:
Well, I've now deleted two posts where I got overly irritated at Sean for his "weak assed" comments and insinuations that those of us who are concerned about safety aren't really, we're just not "real men" and can't fly without help. Sheesh Sean!

And then comes along Andy Blackburn with an eloquent, well written, logical argument that makes any continuation of those sorts of "I'm tougher than you", "you're a wimp and I'm a real man", hopefully look as weak as they are. Thank you, Andy. I haven't met you (I don't think), but look forward to doing so.

And for what it's worth, I personally couldn't care less about leaching. Or about winning a contest - and I suspect there are a lot like me. I get to fly 1 or 2 contests a year because of my job. One of my main aims is to maximize the chance of leaving that contest alive. It's yet another group that I hope the RC considers - us amateurs who do this not for the glory, not for the hope of standing on some wooden pedestal holding a tin trophy, but for the fun of hanging out, safely, with our friends. Pretty weak-assed, but there it is.

I still remember an elderly gentleman (no longer with us) missing me by about 20 feet some 17 years ago at Newcastle as he went straight through my thermal at 100 mph. I swear I saw his eyes... And he still didn't see me as he went by. I'll fully admit that I was so focused on centering that I didn't see him coming either. Anything - absolutely anything - that I can do to not repeat that little bit of fun is great with me. And I suspect that if the same gentleman had a device that gave him 60 seconds warning, he'd still be searching around trying to find where the warning was coming from me as he smacked into me. A few minutes sounds a lot nicer to me than 60 seconds, thank you very much.


Andrew,
I already tried to tone down what I said in the "weak assed" post. We've covered some of this already in other posts. I'll try to be brief.

1) We are talking about a competition or stealth option in contest flying only.

2) There is a fair amount of heads down time associated with open FLARM usage that off sets or in my opinion outweighs the SA gained in regard to safety. So much so that I think some people will over do it and their soaring performance will suffer. This is a nod to Andy's comment on balancing the new technology.

3) Several folks have tried to make it seem that this is about me be overly competitive. Not so. I just think the score sheet should rank who are the better soaring pilots and all that entails, especially in say the top half of the positions. I'll finish where I finish and if I land out, not only will I make some new acquaintances, I will have time to think about what I did to get there. I will not blame bad luck or randomness. I don't get any better by doing that.

4) The idea that cross country or racing is starting to involve using a display to read values and pick this thermal or that one at a distance is "weak assed" or watered down from what it once was. I do believe this. This what I meant to say. If I insulted those who simply go to contests for a good time and learn or who's only goal is to get around the course and back home, I apologize. Like I said getting frustrated. So nothing to do with safety.. Open FLARM and FLARM used in a competition or stealth mode both offer plenty of safety to prevent the near miss you described. Safety of open FLARM being better due to SA is overstated due to the heads down time mentioned above.

Thanks for not posting your overly-irritated responses,

XC

OK, let's just handle your major point, Sean - the heads down problem. When would you prefer someone to be heads down - 4 minutes before smacking into you, or 60 seconds before smacking into you?