On Wednesday, October 7, 1998 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, Eric June wrote:
Armand,

The CAI L-NAV has such an alarm built-in. It is a slow speed alarm that
sounds whenever your airspeed drops below the speed that you set it at.
I never used that feature as it didn't seem that useful, since your
stall speed is a function of bank angle.

My L-NAV also had the G-meter option installed. A better design would
be to couple the measured airspeed with the measured G's to give an
alarm that would be a function of bank angle (via G's). However, such
an alarm would also sound during a pull-up, loop, or other maneuver
where the G load increases.

I didn't get a chance to try out all the L-NAV features, maybe they had
something like this already designed in (??).

--
Regards,

Eric June

SZD-59 "SE"
Hang Gliding Page: http://home.kudonet.com/~ericj/hang.htm

Hi Eric,

With all due respect, you are a dead man walking. Normally this type of accident should be a fatality. Thankfully, for you and your family, you survived.

I have read a lot of responses in this thread that essentially boil down to this: is there technology out there that can save us from poor pilotmanship? The answer is: be a better pilot and you don't need that crutch. In another thread I defined a "low save" as one from which a stall-spin recover is unlikely; this was the situation that you found yourself. ATTENTION: if any of you find yourself in this same situation you MUST devote MAXIMUM EFFORT in flying the glider properly, namely extra airspeed and COORDINATED FLIGHT (you can't spin if you are flying coordinated)! Having an alarm start blaring might actually due more harm than good (it may very well distract you from the primary task).

Why is it that people resort to crutches rather than accept personal responsibility? I do not know, but it reflects a disturbing lack of confidence in their piloting capabilities.

Tom