At 15:06 30 October 2012, wrote:
Don,

I fully agree that maintaining a good lookout at all times
is a good basis for see-and-avoid.

However, we believe that even the best pilot may occasionally fail to
detect traffic.
There are a number of human factors which affect perception
(distraction, selective attention, target merging into background, target
not
moving wrt. background, etc).

We have a presentation where on one slide we listed the situations where
FLARM
has potentially better and/or earlier chances to detect traffic than the
human eye.

These situations a
- Head-on and converging course (both gliders in cruise), especially in
the
presence of clouds, snow fields etc.
- One glider circling, another one approaching the same thermal.
- Two gliders circling in opposite directions (yes, we know this
shouldn't
happen...)

As you say, the fewer gliders in a thermal, the more helpful FLARM can
be.

FLARM does help in wave, but the indicated relative bearing to the threat
may be strongly biased by wind.

Needless to say, whenever a FLARM warning occurs, the pilot should
immediately
try to make visual contact with the threat.

In the Classic FLARM manual, we write:

"Under no circumstances should a pilot or crewmember adopt different
tactics or deviate from the normal principles of safe airmanship."

I think that summarizes it quite nicely.

Best
--Gerhard

Gerhard

I do not disagree with you, FLARM does help, with the emphasis on help, it
does not replace or indeed lessen the necessity for a good lookout. My
argument was contering the statement that, "The difference between midairs
and all other cause of accidents is that it is the only type which you can
do almost nothing to prevent it, except using flarm." which I think you
will agree is a load of total ********. FLARM can assit the aware pilot, it
is NOT the answer to preventing mid air collisions.
In Europe we do have, or some of us do, the LX8000 which does give the
radar display, however it takes time to see all the other gliders, time
which would be beter spent looking out.