OK, I've been lurking on this topic long enough.

I regullarly make low-pass finnish at the end of the majority of my
soaring flights, and know when and where to expect other aircraft in
the traffic pattern. I plan and adjust my actions acrodingly. In
addition to my experience flying gliders I also have over 600 hours of
instruction given in the Southern California airspace (flying powered
aircraft), along with over 500 hours of flying a Beech Bonanza
corporatly into the majority of class Bravo airports through out the
country. With all of my experiences the closest that I have come to
being in a mid-air is not finnishing at the gliderport, but flying VFR
traffic patterns with students at untowered fields. This is by far the
closest resemblience to a finish cylinder that the majority of pilots
encounter during their flying carrier. Even though there are
recomended procedures to enter a VFR pattern pilots will choose to
otherwise depending on their situation. Conversely, flying an ILS
approach most closely resembles a finish gate senario: all the traffic
is flying the same direction, for the same destination (how i miss
AST's). When a pilot reports the final approach fix on an ILS (or for
any instrument appraoch) you know exactly where he is at, the same
holds true for finnish gate procedures with a common final turnpoint,
four miles is going to be four miles! My concern has never been that I
am going to climb into someone (or that some one is going to climb into
me), but that we are going to converge on each other. The only mid-air
collision that I have personal knowledge of, that occured in the
traffic pattern, happend when two of my colleuges were turning from
cross-wind to down-wind, in a Duchess, when a Mooney struck them after
making an improper postion report, and this was at a towered field!
(See http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?e...27X05234&key=2 NTSB
Report:LAX02FA288B)

SO.... I contend that the finish cylinder is not going to provide
safety at a contest. I conceed that there are locations where a finish
cylinder does provide a better finishing enviroment, considering other
airport operations. Ideally by providing an established finishing
routine (I like the ideas of mandatory final turns) we as pilots can
provide better position reports facilitating our communications with
each other over the radio - the best tool that we have to avoid
mid-airs and make the finish area (gate or otherwise) a safer
environment.


Orion Kingman
DV8
Phoenix