On Friday, July 6, 2012 6:48:24 AM UTC-7, son_of_flubber wrote:
On Friday, July 6, 2012 2:13:46 AM UTC-4, Darryl Ramm wrote:
On Thursday, July 5, 2012 9:00:57 PM UTC-7, son_of_flubber wrote:
Just curious. Do the gliders in this video have FLARM? How well does it work in this sort of flying?

OzFlarm is pretty popular in Australia, and use of flarm is mandatory for this Australian contest. But I'm curious what you meant by "this sort of flying". They are basically flying a contest, and the myriad possibilities that involves (large gaggles, leaching/following, buddy flying etc.). Or was there something specific you meant?

Nope. I'm a clueless newbie about contest flying. I read "Joey Glide Camp" (not Comp) and thought this was a training camp for young pilots. I'm vaguely aware that some contests nowadays deliberately increase separation between gliders, and I did not realize that people were still deliberately flying this close.

I guess that the OZFlarm works pretty well? Is it common for the OZFlarm to prompt evasive moves in the circumstances shown in this video?

You'll see a lot of close flying and many larger gaggles in contests or even fun get together or buddy flying.

Just to be clear, Flarm only alerts you to possible collision threats, it does not direct an evasive moves. And a hugely important part of flarm's technology is that it uses the path of the other aircraft to try to predict what is a real collision threat, so you can be in some even relatively close spaced situation and the flarm is not distracting you with unnecessary alerts.

Yes OZflarm and other flarm products work pretty well, that is why there are over ten thousand of them installed worldwide and why finally getting flarm technology into the USA (and getting some of the teething problems with PowerFLARM shaken out here) is so important, for contest and non-contest pilots.

Darryl