PowerFLARM leeching comments

On Oct 18, 1:19*pm, Mike the Strike wrote:
I'm with Dave on this one. *Even though we have seen competitors zoom off towards a PowerFlarm target they saw climbing strongly, I am not sure this will turn out to be the advantage many wish for. *I can't count the times I have ended up a thousand feet or so below a colleague climbing at ten knots to find nothing there - the thermal bubble had departed upwards!

My opinion is that knowing the location of nearby competitors is useful for both safety and tactics, but will impart no advantage if the information is available to everyone. *I strongly oppose the adoption of the "stealth' mode for this reason.

Mike

My view: There are two basic questions about flarm leeching:

1) Does it work, really, in practice? As others have mentioned,
information more than a few miles away is pretty useless. I can see
some help in keeping teams together, and the comments on uvalde blogs
bear that out. But if you can't see the glider, it's not obvious that
going to its thermal is going to help.

2) If it does work, do pilots like or dislike the change in the racing
experience? The answer from Europe seems to be "like." We have not
heard a chorus of "flarm leeching is ruining the sport" though
they've been at it 10 years. We have heard a bunch of "I miss the AST
when you knew where people were," and perhaps flarm displays will
bring back some of this experience.

Still, our (US) ratio of theory to experience on both issues --
especially the second -- strikes me as pretty large at the moment.
Next year will be an interesting racing season.

John Cochrane