On Monday, November 30, 2015 at 10:09:44 AM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
Ugh - typos fixed.

My considered opinion on this is fivefold:

1) You can do most of this today without use of Flarm or a data connection to the ground. WinPilot has offered aggregate heat maps of thermal locations and strengths based on any number of uploaded IGC tracks, filtered for time of day, time of year, sun angle, wind direction, etc. for a decade or so.. Nobody I know uses it. You also can - with a little effort - upload BlipMap data to your flight computer to see where you are versus forecasted weather patterns (not historical weather, which is generally far less helpful when things are changing through the day). I've been doing it on paper for years. Once in a while it helps on convergence days.

2) The incremental benefit of seeing gliders in the local area outside a mile or two - all the way out to the entire contest area - doesn't matter very much at all and it won't in the future - probably not ever. Most of the time, trying to track and use Flarm thermals hurts your speed. Traditional leeching is hard enough to do, and is of limited, mostly defensive, value. The data strongly suggest that the further back you trail the less value there is and it pretty quickly turns negative. As previously mentioned - an analysis of thermal leeching shows consistently weaker climbs for gliders trailing more than a few minutes behind. You could maybe get a super-computer to try to come up with an estimate of thermal locations and strengths but subtle differences in the scene out the window (clouds, ripples on ponds, tree leaves turning up and showing a different color on a ridge line, haze domes, dust devils, cloud shadows, cirrus decks, sun on rocks, wind changes, prior experiences with all of the above) all matter so much more and don't make it into the hypothetical heat map. It is mostly out of date a minute after it is produced. Everything I ever learned about analytics, optimization and feedback systems and every single contest day I've scrutinized tells me this problem has way too little signal and way too much noise for anyone to benefit - even if you know every thermal in use or recently in use over the entire course.

3) Even a God-map of previously used thermals over the entire course did provide useful information that made more than a handful of points difference in a race it doesn't materially change the role of the pilot - which is to make tactical decisions about what course to fly and what thermals to take versus pass up - all based on highly variable, uncertain and time-sensitive information about not what is going on right now but what is likely to be going at some time and place in the future that you can actually get to in time for it to matter. More information is just information - more historical information, particularly about choices pilots made about which course to fly or thermal to take is mostly irrelevant but I see no harm in pilots trying to use it. It doesn't turn glider flying into a video game any more than a variometer or GPS do. The decision-making maybe gets a little richer, certainly not more robotic. The "head in the cockpit" argument is also bunk. Any pilot who doesn't understand how to do an instrument scan shouldn't be flying no matter what - but in particular looking at a display that is filled with a radar scope of where all the other gliders are hardly seems worse than looking outside trying to pick up maybe half or less of them with the naked eye.

4) For the odd situation where situational data does provide useful information, it mostly evens out what most pilots I know think of as luck or unfair advantages - and outcomes that the current scoring formulae devalue for that reason. On a ridge day, you will be able to discover that - well - the ridge is working, and on a wave day you'll maybe be able to discover the location of the wave so that the one or two pilots who stumble into it or have local knowledge won't run away with the day when everyone else gets stuck or slow, unless of course we want more random variation and local knowledge to determine the order of the scoresheet. I'm more for an even playing field but I know others hold local secrets close and lobby to have Nationals held where they fly a lot - at least in part so they can gain some edge.

5) More pilots report that they prefer having more situational awareness - both for enjoyment and peace of mind - than pilots report they want less - by about 2 to 1. Pilots who don't fly contests report that having information about other pilots' locations makes them more likely to race, and the reverse is also true without this information they are less likely to try racing - OLC becomes too appealing. Given that, I'm much more in favor of waiting to see if some dire miscarriage of justice results from all of these new innovations. Innovations that mostly can be available on pretty inexpensive mass-produced consumer devices that most of us already carry in our pockets.

I realize change is disquieting, particularly if you think you have some advantage under the status quo, but I don't think that's inherently a reason to try to hold back the tides of change.

My 2c.

9B