Attitudes & Reality

On Monday, May 7, 2018 at 9:50:41 AM UTC-4, wrote:
Recall hearing that combat pilots in Vietnam would shut off all of their enemy radar/SAM missile warnings. relying on their eyes and radio calls from fellow pilots the electronic warnings being a distraction from staying alive. Any jet pilots from that era that can confirm or correct?

Be sure to consult the dead ones, too. You want a fair and representative sample that includes the guys that might want a mulligan.

What's going on in this thread is the construction of edge cases and straw men. Edge cases might be real, but not representative of 95% of reality. The reality w.r.t. Flarm is that the bugs crawl around on the map where you might, or might not look at them and if one manages to get on an intersecting course with predicted close approach of around 25 seconds, the first stage alarm goes off, in my cockpit that's a clear male voice that announces "Traffic, 3 o'clock low" or whatever. There is also a display of relative bearing, relative altitude & distance (which I almost never look at). Alarm fatigue is not a factor.

It's like having a back seater with 4 pi steriradian xray vision, provided the other glider has flarm. It works -really- well. Can it fail? Sure. Would I trust it enough to alter my decision making or lookout in any way? Of course not. Is it worth having in a contest environment or other densely populated airspace (e.g. the Alps)? Yes, indeed.

If flarm is only 90% effective (choose another number if you like, but it appears to be pretty good) at reducing collisions, does this reduce it's value to zero? Of course not. You only need one pilot to take action to avoid a collision. Even if you can't cope, if you have flarm, I can avoid you.

Power flarm adds collision alerts for ADSB traffic transmitting on 1090es. That's a lot of small, fast jets, turbo props and such, in addition to slower GA and airliners. I see this traffic routinely (enough that I filter for relative altitude and distance so as not to clutter the display). I have yet to have a conflict alert for an ADSB contact, but that might come in handy for someone, some day.

Don't want to buy it? Statistically, you'll probably (there's that word) be okay, but please stop making fun of the guys that decided to throw down the money and solve that problem.

The only glider mid air I know of involving a flarm equipped glider in the US was the poor guy who got clobbered by a non-flarm equipped glider. No one died, which is why you haven't heard about it.

Evan Ludeman / T8