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"Rory O'Conor" wrote in message ... Mid Air collisions are a problem. Maybe we need to pull together more information about them. There are a number of different phases of flight during which they occur: Climbing phase (high Angle of Attack) (power planes only) Circuit phase (all planes) Aerobatics (all planes) IFR & low visibility flight (all planes) Normal flight (all planes) Thermalling (soaring planes only) We need to understand the proportion of collisions occurring in the different phases and the potential contributory factors. Road Traffic Accidents happen more often in good weather than bad. It is not entirely clear that thermal collisions happen more often in competition gaggles than when there are only two in a thermal, whatever our instincts. For the different flight phases, different factors will be more or less important and the solutions and devices to prevent collisions may be different. Personnally I would be surprised if TCAS devices could cope with resolving the trajectories of thermalling gliders other than the basic level of identifying another nearby plane. Thus I suspect that the main detection instrument in thermals remains the eyeball. In which case, every effort should be made to ensure the best use of the eyeball in thermals. There may be a role for such devices in other phases eg normal flight and IFR. The only power planes that regularly fly close together are the military and aerobatic display teams. I am sure that the Red Arrows are fitted with the instruments that they best require, but I would be most surprised if they have any electronic device warning them that they are about to hit a team-mate. I expect that they do a lot of training, have superb lookout and excellent communications. I would assume that a TCAS/GPS device will be making noises at 1 mile and probably very loud noises at 1/4 mile (1500 ft). With a typical thermalling diameter of 200-600 feet and circling period of less than 20 seconds, any normal TCAS would be screaming fit to be turned off! We are also entering the area where the margin of error for a GPS (30 ft horizontally, 100 ft vertically) is a significant issue. GPS is not accurate enough to tell which side of the highway you are driving on, nor probably to determine the correct seperation of two thermalling gliders when the pilots using their eyeballs consider that they are adequately seperated. I cannot envisage an electronic GPS device for avoiding intra-thermal collisions, assuming that the planes are going to remain in the same thermal. Rory And yet another.... Bill Daniels |
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