On Jun 6, 11:35*am, bildan wrote:
The situation where jets which spend 99% of their time flying fast
have found AOA indicators essential and gliders which spend up to half
their time flying near stall don't have them has always puzzled me.

Might that not be because those jets are total pigs when flown at
approach speed? I suspect that if they didn't have the AOA indicator
then either they would get approached way too fast or else the pilot
would be in a constant state of "we're all gonna DIE!!". And they're
going pretty fast while trying to land on small things, such as ships.

They're also landing well below min drag/sink speed, on the "back side
of the drag curve" and depending on big engines to save their bacon if
the AOA starts to get too high. If we did that in gliders then we'd
sometimes have little option but to dive into the ground in a mush
even if we closed the brakes instantly.

Unlike those jets, we in gliders fly the approach faster and with a
lower angle of attack than many other phases of flight, deliberately
sacrificing some ultimate short landing performance for a large
increase in safety.

I can see that an AOA indicator would be useful for establishing
various reference speeds at a particular weight or bank angle, and
then maintain that configuration via our traditional method of
attitude with respect to the horizon. But I don't think it's
something that we'd ever want to use as a primary reference while
flying,

The flight path of a typical glider flown at a fixed angle of attack
is a diverging phugoid. That's not very useful. Least of all on
approach.