New Butterfly Vario

To prove Bart's point, how about: http://www.hiltonsoftware.com/index.html

The iPad is thin enough to tuck behind your seatback until after
takeoff, then you lean forward and pop it out (hopefully after you
release from the towplane so you don't risk killing him if you lose
control of the sailplane).

Look, I appreciate a lot of the rules committee and for the most part
I think the guys involved are great people. It can be a tough job and
I'm not upset with them personally. I don't WANT people to cloud-fly,
and I'll certainly NEVER cloud-fly, and I DO think its easy to stay
clear of clouds (even if you're "pushing it"). But this is a total
"cut off our nose to spite our face" kind of deal. You can't possibly
cover every scenario and "strip search" every glider. You can't stop
everyday technology (that people use in their normal life) from
filtering into the sport (shall we try to return to the pre-GPS days,
anyone?).

As far as UH's comment: "There is no way that the RC could ever go to
the BOD and say that we can accept permitting equipment that permits
true cloud flying"
That's fine, but we're not _preventing_ "true cloud flying" right
now. People can still cloud-fly with or without the equipment
(they're just EVEN DUMBER if they do it without the equipment).

Why not tell the BoD that the rules still forbid cloud-flying, and
leave it at that? Or state that both flying IMC and the use of
artificial horizons are against the rules and violators are subject to
explusion and suspension from flying for a period of X years? You can
discourage behavior by instituting extreme penalties for anyone who
gets caught. Yes, their odds of being caught may not be great, but
stiff penalties (including a lengthy ban from contest-flying due to
"unsafe flying") changes the risk-reward equation in people's minds.

And frankly, if someone's determined to cheat they will find a way to
do so. My long experience in auto-racing proves that out! Why make
life hard on *everyone* in a futile attempt to stop a few bad apples?

Let's try a thought-experiment: We handicap gliders based on their
make/model, because we expect all gliders of a given model to perform
relatively similarly, right? How come we don't check to see if
someone's reprofiled the wings of their ship, to give them a better
airfoil? They could theoretically get better performance than the
handicap indicates. It would be hard to detect - especially with an
older glider in Sports Class that's been refinished once or twice in
its life. It would be even harder to prove. But under the same logic
being applied to the Artificial Horizon gear, we would have to measure
every airfoil of every glider, and BAN all gliders that have any signs
of being refinished. Hunting down and trying to eradicate all
potential sources of artificial horizons or instrument-flying seems as
equally-impractical as what I've just proposed.

The point is, as Bart says, there are some things that are just not
practical to try to control 100%. Why not just declare that the use
of such device functions illegal, and then rely on the protest process
to throw out the few bums who cloud-fly and (hopefully) get caught?
Why hurt everyone who's trying to buy a good piece of equipment or is
getting into competitions "on the cheap" with free PDA software, or
who owns a modern cell-phone?

I'm not mad, I'm just bewildered...

--Noel