On Saturday, March 17, 2012 1:21:54 PM UTC-7, Marc wrote:
On Mar 17, 8:26*am, Bob Kuykendall wrote:
Here's one mo

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/br...08X06780&key=2


I'd love to know additional details of the circumstances for each. Particularly factors such as contest or not, major airport nearby or not, in traffic pattern vs climb/descent vs cruise, straight flight vs thermalling, etc. While vigilance is always important it would be great to know if there is any consistent pattern to midairs, even if it's a small number in total. It's particularly useful in terms of driving PowerFlarm adoption. There is some thinking that contest flying represents the highest likelihood of midair per hour flown and that other gliders are the biggest threat. Does the data back up that notion?

From my incomplete personal recall of the collisions I know, it would appear that collisions between two gliders in a contest represent something like 20-30% of all midairs. I'd guess contest flying is less than 5% of all glider hours (any real data available?), so that would say that contest flying is at least four times as likely per hour of flight to result in a midair as any other glider flying and the main threat is another contestant. At first blush it appears a solid argument for PowerFlarm rentals focused on contests. Seems like towplanes might benefit too.

9B