If You've Flown a FLARM Stealth Contest, Vote Here

The vote from Elmira was 13 for stealth mandatory out of a field of 41 entrants. That is a less than ringing endorsement.


Looking at the both questions you can see a similar number of folks don't think FLARM should be mandatory.

I guess you can read the results however you desire.

XC

On Friday, December 4, 2015 at 10:30:42 PM UTC-5, wrote:
Lots of earnest opinions, some more strident than others. Lots of confident statements about what works, doesn't work, is possible, is futile, is inevitable.

So let's keep it simple: if you have flown in a contest at any level where stealth was mandated (not necessarily mandatory FLARM, but if FLARM was used, it had to be in stealth mode), what was your experience?

If you HAVEN'T flown in a stealth-mandatory contest, DON'T POST. You had your chance to speculate and make your opinions heard (some of you many, many times) over in "Is FLARM Helpful?" We could run this over on Survey Monkey, et al., but I think it's useful to track the responses on this forum..

My view based on the Elmira nats in 2015: FLARM under stealth provided the collision avoidance and situational awareness intended without changing the tactics or strategy of the competitive flying significantly.

My vote: "yes" for mandatory stealth mode.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.

I agree with JB. I was pretty happy with using it in Stealth mode at Elmira. I would vote "yes" as well.

Mike Opitz
Discus-2b "RO"

On Friday, December 4, 2015 at 10:30:42 PM UTC-5, wrote:
Lots of earnest opinions, some more strident than others. Lots of confident statements about what works, doesn't work, is possible, is futile, is inevitable.

So let's keep it simple: if you have flown in a contest at any level where stealth was mandated (not necessarily mandatory FLARM, but if FLARM was used, it had to be in stealth mode), what was your experience?

If you HAVEN'T flown in a stealth-mandatory contest, DON'T POST. You had your chance to speculate and make your opinions heard (some of you many, many times) over in "Is FLARM Helpful?" We could run this over on Survey Monkey, et al., but I think it's useful to track the responses on this forum..

My view based on the Elmira nats in 2015: FLARM under stealth provided the collision avoidance and situational awareness intended without changing the tactics or strategy of the competitive flying significantly.

My vote: "yes" for mandatory stealth mode.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.

I helped organize the 2015 Std./15m Nationals in Elmira where we used FLARM in stealth mode. Flying with the stealth was fine with plenty of collision avoidance. Administratively, it presented no real problems.

I also flew the Pan American Glider Contest with IGC rules. I liked the IGC rules generally. The rules allow team flying and full usage of FLARM. Because of this I know FLARM displays are definitely being used tactically. I even used FLARM this way myself. Any pilot would be at a disadvantage if they didn't. I feel strongly this use of FLARM is a bad thing for sailplane racing.

To use another analogy because some think I am being a luddite. When we went from maps and cameras to GPS it was like writers moving from pen and paper or a typewriter to a word processor or a computer. It made writing, or in our case navigating, easier and faster. Unlimited use of FLARM in contests often amounts to plagiarism or stealing some else's work. The idea that everyone doing it will lead to some bright new future for our sport is wrong minded in my opinion. Use of unlimited FLARM displays in contests will lead to reduced brilliance.

XC

Two points:

Elmira flying is very different than the flying in Utah, or in the west in general. Thus the results of Elmira are not valid universally applied.

Hasn't the ICG already concluded that the current stealth mode does not provide enough situational awareness, and is not acceptable for mandated use due to safety, coupled with the fact that the company that developed and makes Flarm recommends against the use of stealth? This is why the IGC is working with Flarm to develop a modified stealth mode that provides more situational awareness while removing tactical information?

On Saturday, December 5, 2015 at 7:39:29 AM UTC-8, XC wrote:

To use another analogy because some think I am being a luddite. When we went from maps and cameras to GPS it was like writers moving from pen and paper or a typewriter to a word processor or a computer. It made writing, or in our case navigating, easier and faster. Unlimited use of FLARM in contests often amounts to plagiarism or stealing some else's work. The idea that everyone doing it will lead to some bright new future for our sport is wrong minded in my opinion. Use of unlimited FLARM displays in contests will lead to reduced brilliance.

_______________________

Luddite is an overly dramatic term - but I do think you are revising history a bit. I recall serious and impassioned debates over the years on lots of technology topics. I recently spoke to one of the former members of the RC who voted against allowing GPS. His reasons were about changing the spirit of glider racing.

I got lost every single day one particularly hazy Regionals at Cordele. Not just a little lost - a LOT lost. I got so lost one day at the Standard Class Nationals at Hutchinson that I had to land in a plowed field (every small town in Kansas looks the same from the air unless they label their rooftops - which only some do). Navigation by dead reckoning is definitely a skill and managing final glides without a computer to do all the math for you was part of how races were won and lost back in the 70s and 80s. There was a time when having a calculator in a high school math test was considered cheating. Same argument for gliding - 'stupid' people who couldn't work a wiz wheel would achieve scores they didn't deserve and contest results would be invalid.

We got over it.

I truly don't see material differences in the principles involved here and I see the magnitude of the changes in racing from Flarm or weather radar or even a God-map of every track on course as less transformative to the sport than, say, being able to mark a thermal I climbed in, head out in to the blue to make some needed miles or a turnpoint, and come back to it for a saving climb (though not always - and rarely as good the climb as when I left). Speed to fly variometers make much more difference in scores than tracking a pilot 3 miles ahead of you - who you would otherwise track at 1.5 miles ahead of you (with a much better result if actual data from races is a guide). Materials technologies have transformed glider performance enabling thinner, lighter, ultra laminar flow airfoils that allow for cruise climbing, leaving thermalling skills - and older generations of gliders - effectively in the dustbin competitively.

We ought to come to a collective view on what is the most perfect and pure technology level for the sport, that of 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005 or 2015? Our views of these things evolve over time - perhaps it is generational or perhaps we all get comfortable with technological progress. As a person who needs to think up rules and procedures to restrict, inspect, detect, report, enforce and penalize when we want to hold back the tide of technological progress I can tell you that this is one of the more challenging and onerous ones for organizers because it will all work on the one thing no one is going to get pilots to give up - the $50-500 phone they already carry in their pocket. The pace of technological change from the Internet of Things, Cloud and Mobile is only accelerating, so fasten your safety belts.

Even for pilots who flew the 2015 Nationals the view on what to do for Nationals was statistically evenly split between stealth mandatory and not mandatory by rule. Nationals pilots voted slightly against mandating stealth by rule for Regionals. For everyone else expressing an opinion it was more than 2:1 against - and we didn't even poll all the OLC guys we'd like to attract to racing, but you probably know already what they think. However, rule-making is not purely democratic, and it shouldn't be the case that we simply take votes and write rules to enforce the popular views of the moment. We elect people to the RC to take a deeper and longer view of things and help keep the sport thoughtfully ahead of the evolutions and trends that impact it - and hopefully make it more accessible, enjoyable and fair in the process. What pilots want and think is an input - but only an approximate guide.

As for me, I prefer more contest participation over more contest technology inspection. Putting up technological barriers is mostly a wasteful and ultimately fruitless exercise - and I believe fruitless in this case will get here faster than most people think - perhaps as fast as 2016 or 2017.

9B

(Sorry Chip I didn't fly Harris Hill - but I plan to fly Nephi if that helps)

On Friday, December 4, 2015 at 10:30:42 PM UTC-5, wrote:
Lots of earnest opinions, some more strident than others. Lots of confident statements about what works, doesn't work, is possible, is futile, is inevitable.

So let's keep it simple: if you have flown in a contest at any level where stealth was mandated (not necessarily mandatory FLARM, but if FLARM was used, it had to be in stealth mode), what was your experience?

If you HAVEN'T flown in a stealth-mandatory contest, DON'T POST. You had your chance to speculate and make your opinions heard (some of you many, many times) over in "Is FLARM Helpful?" We could run this over on Survey Monkey, et al., but I think it's useful to track the responses on this forum..

My view based on the Elmira nats in 2015: FLARM under stealth provided the collision avoidance and situational awareness intended without changing the tactics or strategy of the competitive flying significantly.

My vote: "yes" for mandatory stealth mode.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.

As only the 4th pilot, by my count, to ring in, I will provide my personal view of my experience at Elmira.
I had no unfavorable issues with Stealth at Elmira. My sense was that there was no degradation of safety. I heard of no safety concerns voiced. Possibly there were, but I did not hear them. I did hear one or two in disagreement with the decision to implement Stealth mode, based upon the individual's personal philosophy. Not surprising.
I liked being able to sneak away at the start knowing that my competitors would not be able to use to use Flarm radar to track me and use my flight decisions as data for their decision.
I liked my principle opponent no knowing when I went in the middle of a task when I slipped away and made a big points day on him.
On another day I didn't much like not having radar when my principle opponent got the hot climb at a critical point and whupped us all badly.
Live by the sword- die by the sword.
What I am sure of is that we each scored based upon our decisions, without radar help. I personally would like to stay with this long held general character of our sport.
I do know of a couple pilots that had technical difficulties with the Flarms staying in Stealth. One landed back to correct the problem and unfortunately got hurt in his score that day due to the timing of his land back and relight.
As requested above, this was my experience.
UH

Since requesting input this morning from pilots who flew at Elmira, I've been misquoted, misinterpreted, and ignored. I feel like I'm married again. Just kidding!

13 of the 24 Elmira pilots who apparently voted in the pilots' poll favored mandatory stealth. That's 54%+ of those who tried it liked it enough to want it mandatory. If I were into playing statistical games, I might say this is a clear majority in favor!

Or how about this: 100% of the pilots responding to my "voting" request today who flew at Elmira favor mandatory stealth.

But I sense that facts aren't really important. Positions are so inflexible that data that support or can be manipulated into supporting a position are gleefully trumpeted. Less convenient data are ignored or dismissed with "yes, but I know better."

I didn't have a position until Elmira. I hadn't even flown with FLARM until then. I tried stealth and liked it. And after I flew another FLARM contest in the fall--without stealth--I confirmed that I liked stealth better, for all the reasons I've already listed.

A few other thoughts: People speak of the "GPS wars" as if it were a dark time in the land when ignorance and superstition ruled. I was quite vocal in opposing GPS when it first appeared, for several reasons.

Cost was the big one. The early Cambridge loggers cost in the neighborhood of $3,000, IIRC. I initially bought a consumer handheld unit for $200. When I finally was forced to buy an approved logger, the price was down to ONLY $1,200. That was still too much, especially for guys who had less than $20,000 in their whole rigs, but at least I'd helped delay things. That was really what I was after all along: just to slow things down.

I'm not a technophobe. My undergraduate degree was in engineering, I did some early coding on mainframes, I've been using PCs since the DOS days, I've been on the Internet since you had to know some Unix to set up a connection, and I've worked as an IT consultant for 16 years. One thing I sometimes have to gently counsel clients is that technology is never a goal; it's always a means to an end. Sometimes young pilots lose sight of that.

As for my passion for the "old ways", I admit that another reason for opposing GPS was that navigation used to be part of the game. There were certain pilots who could be relied upon to get lost at least once per contest. I'm not referring to you, 9B; you didn't have to confess. And BB, you don't have to confess if you don't want to.

Overnight with GPS, their placings shot up. I don't think it's simplistic to say they didn't get better; we just dumbed down the game. At that point, we probably didn't have any choice, though. GPS was widely available and the hue and cry from navigationally challenged pilots was getting pretty shrill.

Finally, I was offended, frankly, by all the talk of how GPS would improve safety by eliminating the "dangerous" high-speed start. In reality, I know of at least one pilot who nearly crashed watching his final glide unreel on the GPS screen until he was too low to find a decent field. And I suspect everyone else did what I did--eliminated the safety cushion I had dialed in to account for uncertainty of my position and just cut it even finer on final glides. I was also offended by all the talk about how GPS would make soaring more accessible and more fun, and how contest participation would surge as a result. Sure.

So, yeah, there are some parallels between FLARM stealth and GPS.

I should also speak to the comment about making soaring as safe as shuffleboard. I'm for safety as much as almost anyone. I've given myriad safety talks. 20+ years ago I paid a premium to get Gerhard Waibel's ASW 24 with its safety cockpit, then added canopy wire deflector bars, an ELT, an onboard water system and a pee system, and a 6-point harness to prevent submarining in a crash. I secured everything that could come loose. I've lost both my father and my best friend to glider crashes, plus other pilots I've known. I think I know my limits and I try to fly within them, recognizing that I sometimes make mistakes. I've eagerly welcomed the added security I believe FLARM provides and I don't believe stealth compromises that.

But...if soaring were 100% risk free, it wouldn't have the same appeal. I like knowing I can push as hard as I want, limited only by fear and my assessment of my skills. I especially like competition flying because it inspires me to push myself to do as well as I can against the best pilots. Playing shuffleboard with them just doesn't do it for me.

So, sorry. I don't have a death wish but I don't think we should try to take every bit of adventure out of competition soaring. BB probably knows where I'm going with this and it's unrelated to FLARM but I'll say it anyway: I like the finish gate and low passes. They're fun. Soaring is appealing in part because it isn't perfectly safe. So yeah, I understand why the sanitized version, dumbed down so anyone with radar can follow the fast guys around, wouldn't have the same appeal to everyone. If that's what you want, go play video games.

For the rest of you, let's see what pilots think after Nephi.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.

On Saturday, December 5, 2015 at 11:56:12 PM UTC-5, wrote:
Since requesting input this morning from pilots who flew at Elmira, I've been misquoted, misinterpreted, and ignored. I feel like I'm married again. Just kidding!

13 of the 24 Elmira pilots who apparently voted in the pilots' poll favored mandatory stealth. That's 54%+ of those who tried it liked it enough to want it mandatory. If I were into playing statistical games, I might say this is a clear majority in favor!

Or how about this: 100% of the pilots responding to my "voting" request today who flew at Elmira favor mandatory stealth.

But I sense that facts aren't really important. Positions are so inflexible that data that support or can be manipulated into supporting a position are gleefully trumpeted. Less convenient data are ignored or dismissed with "yes, but I know better."

I didn't have a position until Elmira. I hadn't even flown with FLARM until then. I tried stealth and liked it. And after I flew another FLARM contest in the fall--without stealth--I confirmed that I liked stealth better, for all the reasons I've already listed.

A few other thoughts: People speak of the "GPS wars" as if it were a dark time in the land when ignorance and superstition ruled. I was quite vocal in opposing GPS when it first appeared, for several reasons.

Cost was the big one. The early Cambridge loggers cost in the neighborhood of $3,000, IIRC. I initially bought a consumer handheld unit for $200. When I finally was forced to buy an approved logger, the price was down to ONLY $1,200. That was still too much, especially for guys who had less than $20,000 in their whole rigs, but at least I'd helped delay things. That was really what I was after all along: just to slow things down.

I'm not a technophobe. My undergraduate degree was in engineering, I did some early coding on mainframes, I've been using PCs since the DOS days, I've been on the Internet since you had to know some Unix to set up a connection, and I've worked as an IT consultant for 16 years. One thing I sometimes have to gently counsel clients is that technology is never a goal; it's always a means to an end. Sometimes young pilots lose sight of that.

As for my passion for the "old ways", I admit that another reason for opposing GPS was that navigation used to be part of the game. There were certain pilots who could be relied upon to get lost at least once per contest. I'm not referring to you, 9B; you didn't have to confess. And BB, you don't have to confess if you don't want to.

Overnight with GPS, their placings shot up. I don't think it's simplistic to say they didn't get better; we just dumbed down the game. At that point, we probably didn't have any choice, though. GPS was widely available and the hue and cry from navigationally challenged pilots was getting pretty shrill.

Finally, I was offended, frankly, by all the talk of how GPS would improve safety by eliminating the "dangerous" high-speed start. In reality, I know of at least one pilot who nearly crashed watching his final glide unreel on the GPS screen until he was too low to find a decent field. And I suspect everyone else did what I did--eliminated the safety cushion I had dialed in to account for uncertainty of my position and just cut it even finer on final glides. I was also offended by all the talk about how GPS would make soaring more accessible and more fun, and how contest participation would surge as a result. Sure.

So, yeah, there are some parallels between FLARM stealth and GPS.

I should also speak to the comment about making soaring as safe as shuffleboard. I'm for safety as much as almost anyone. I've given myriad safety talks. 20+ years ago I paid a premium to get Gerhard Waibel's ASW 24 with its safety cockpit, then added canopy wire deflector bars, an ELT, an onboard water system and a pee system, and a 6-point harness to prevent submarining in a crash. I secured everything that could come loose. I've lost both my father and my best friend to glider crashes, plus other pilots I've known. I think I know my limits and I try to fly within them, recognizing that I sometimes make mistakes. I've eagerly welcomed the added security I believe FLARM provides and I don't believe stealth compromises that.

But...if soaring were 100% risk free, it wouldn't have the same appeal. I like knowing I can push as hard as I want, limited only by fear and my assessment of my skills. I especially like competition flying because it inspires me to push myself to do as well as I can against the best pilots. Playing shuffleboard with them just doesn't do it for me.

So, sorry. I don't have a death wish but I don't think we should try to take every bit of adventure out of competition soaring. BB probably knows where I'm going with this and it's unrelated to FLARM but I'll say it anyway: I like the finish gate and low passes. They're fun. Soaring is appealing in part because it isn't perfectly safe. So yeah, I understand why the sanitized version, dumbed down so anyone with radar can follow the fast guys around, wouldn't have the same appeal to everyone. If that's what you want, go play video games.

For the rest of you, let's see what pilots think after Nephi.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.

Chip,
you can spin this as much as you want, but it is undeniable that stealth mode reduces your ability to avoid mid air collision. You simply can't argue this point.

We put PowerFlarm into our cockpits for safety reasons. I put an ADS-B out for safety reasons as well. I want to be seen by everyone. You can buy dual band ADS-B receivers for $500. A lot of power traffic has them these days. You can buy 1090 receiver today for $25 and it even works.

If you have ADS-B out you can see traffic all around you within 15 nm radius and you see how fast it is climbing. Even if the other glider is equipped only with transponder you can still see all this information because of TIS-B. Gliders without ADS-B out will see part of that traffic as a result of it being transmitted to you (not all of it).

Are you going to outlaw ADS-B out in the cockpit, because of the extra information it provides? You simply can't. I know of more pilots who are in the process of installing ADS-B out.

I hope this stealth mode rule never gets approved and if it does, I will choose to stop going to contests. I bet there will be quite a few others who will do the same. I have a family and I want to be around for my kids.

I would hope that some on the RC and some here supporting the stealth mode would stop being selfish and start thinking about contest pilots as human beings with families who have a duty to their families first.

It is disturbing to me that in the name of "preserving the spirit" one wants to decrease his ability to avoid a mid-air collision. Start thinking about your loved once and what you own them first and then think about the "spirit".

If you have ADS-B out you can see traffic all around you within 15 nm radius and you see how fast it is climbing. Even if the other glider is equipped only with transponder you can still see all this information because of TIS-B. Gliders without ADS-B out will see part of that traffic as a result of it being transmitted to you (not all of it).

Are you going to outlaw ADS-B out in the cockpit, because of the extra information it provides? You simply can't. I know of more pilots who are in the process of installing ADS-B out.

If your aircraft's information is tagged as a glider with ADS-B, a competition mode can still be implemented that would display all the power traffic for you. You can tweak the parameters of this competition or stealth mode to provide plenty of collision avoidance. I think 10-18 seconds warning, knowing that the warnings are not perfect is enough for me. But it could made greater.

The next post will probably argue about enforceability. We spend way too much time worrying about these cheaters who I've never met.

I still don't feel that I am risking my life by flying gliders even without FLARM. FLARM is just another tool we have now. Let's use it appropriately, for collision avoidance, not to redefine the basic skills of our sport.

XC

On Sunday, December 6, 2015 at 7:02:57 AM UTC-8, XC wrote:

If your aircraft's information is tagged as a glider with ADS-B, a competition mode can still be implemented that would display all the power traffic for you. You can tweak the parameters of this competition or stealth mode to provide plenty of collision avoidance. I think 10-18 seconds warning, knowing that the warnings are not perfect is enough for me. But it could made greater.

This seems like a non-trivial exercise. Putting aside for the moment that you'd also be blanking out non-contest glider traffic. The advantage we have with Flarm is that it is a sole-source technology (though I know some have complained about this fact for cost and other reasons). It give us the advantage of being able to go to one vendor and though one means or another get them to implement filters to the data that the device otherwise puts out.

It's not so easy in a world with multiple vendors and different layers of the technology stack and open standards. Outside the world of Flarm there are multiple ways to:

1) Transmit GPS position: ADS-B UAT, ADS-B 1090ES, Flarm, Transponder via TIS-B rebroadcast under ADS-R via ADS-B ground stations, satellite (InReach, Spot, etc.) and a whole host of inexpensive consumer technologies that are out or coming out that use either mobile phone GPS or low-power ISM-band (what Flarm uses) GPS tags (track your pet, bike, child, etc).

2) Collect GPS positions. There is direct UHF (mostly ISM-band) including Flarm, ADS-B, ADS-R, but also via in-cockpit internet connection - mostly via cellphone data or even text connection, but other link layers are possible. Even the satellite trackers have dedicated web pages that don't necessarily abide by the 15-minute delay rules, so a little web-coding and you are good to go.

3) Communicate from receive device to display device. Historically via serial port or USB, increasingly via WiFi and Bluetooth, which are nearly impossible to pick up via inspection.

4) Display the targets. Displays range from high-end bespoke devices made by the likes of LX Nav, LX Navigation and ClearNav (among others), to the PNA category (Oudie and a bunch of Chinese-sourced devices), to totally non-soaring-driven Android and iOS Phones, Phablets and tablets at the low-cost end of the spectrum (low-cost since most people already own one). The software may be proprietary, independent of the device maker or totally open-source. Some software may be soaring-specific, but much more of it for traffic situational awareness is make for non-soaring aviation.

The tough part is that all you need to do is get a stream of position data from anywhere, get it into the cockpit by any of a variety of means and deliver it for display on any device, many of which are made by manufacturers who don't care at all about soaring. Now that would take a bit of putting things together to run on a bespoke soaring computer if there were no reason to do it other than to cheat at glider racing (which somebody might try to do, but it's a bit of effort to take an NMEA stream, delete or spoof the aircraft time and MUX it into the stream from another GPS source like Flarm).. But here's the thing, except for a subset of racing glider pilots, everybody else in soaring (especially XC and OLC pilots, GA pilots, airline pilots) WANT all this info in the cockpit without any filters, so I think it'll be a monumental task to get all those different combinations of vendors to cooperate. Also, the rest of aviation doesn't care about our desires to filter traffic so you can always take a GA setup and use that on your Android flight computer with a non-soaring traffic app. Some of that stuff is cheaper than the soaring stuff already.

The alternative is to restrict racing equipment to only the stuff you can control, which is likely the integrated, bespoke stuff - and require pilots to somehow lock up their cellphones. I'm not sure how good an idea it is to mandate that people only carry the most expensive gear.

I'm seeing the future arriving faster than we thought - some of it from the 2020 ADS-B mandate, some of it from advances in GPS trackers, some from advances in mobile devices, some of from advances in data communications and adoption of wireless links and some of it from advances in cloud services that make it easy to move data around. The thought that we are going to be able to control all of that against the forces that are pushing it forward seems, well, complex, daunting and expensive. I give it two years.

Oh - I don't agree that 10 seconds is okay, not for where I fly.

9B