On Wednesday, February 8, 2017 at 5:44:26 PM UTC+3, wrote:
Thanks to all for the useful input. I was mostly interested in throwing this topic up in the air, and seeing where it landed.

For myself, I agree with a previous post that training is important. Indeed, I would argue that training gives the best reward for the time spent.

However, you can supplement training with other goodies (most everyone is flying with some sort of TE compensation for their varios, some have varios that depict the real time wind vector, and many have moving map displays with little tiny ‘amoebas’ crawling all over them for example…)

Someone alluded to seat-of-the-pants flying to ‘feel’ how close you are flying to the stall. This works, and is used by all of us most of the time. I submit that when a pilot is distracted (low level circling in a rough thermal, on a windy day, with the associated drift illusions, and then throw in a FLARM target….) perhaps his feel may be momentarily masked or overridden….Then, wouldn’t it be nice to have a little audio ‘blip’ to warn us that we are suddenly 5% above the stall?

In addition, if we follow this seat of the pants flying to a logical extreme, perhaps we should get rid of the ASI (fly attitude), and also drop the altimeter (we can, after all, look at how big the houses and trees are getting).

Legally-required minimum equipment.

We had (and won) a fight against the local tower guys several years ago. When we called "joining" they told us (along with the traffic, which is useful) the QNH and expected us to read it back. We told them it's a waste of everyone's time and that by the time we've decided to join circuit we're not looking at the altimeter any more. We also convinced them to only tell us about the traffic actually in or very near the circuit, not the ones still five minutes away.

We have students who are near solo do a flight or two with instruments covered. Not a big deal even in a heavy and slippery glider such as the DG1000. I wouldn't want to try to do an outlanding into a 100m field without ASI, but if you've got 400 or 500 meters of space then it's just not an issue.