Stuart & Kerri FERGUSON wrote:
But let's not get too excited, only 300 gliders or approx 30% of the
Australian glider fleet has been fitted.
If that's true, then it's pretty amazing after, oh, I dunno, about a year.
Can you think of anything else that's penetrated that far through the
gliding movement in the same amount of time?
These things will follow a sort of bell-curve statistical distribution
over time, where there's an early trickle of early-adopters who inspire an
increasing number of folks who think it's a great idea, which reaches
a plateau when about half the fleet is outfitted and all the low-hanging
fruit is gathered, and then starts to trail off as the only remaining
people who haven't deployed it are increasingly the real holdouts, until
finally the only folks who haven't committed to it are the ones who never
will.
If that model is accurate, and if it's taken only a year or two to get
to 30%, then we'll probably pass 50% next year, and 75% - 80% the year
after.
Wow.
to be truly effective there has to be an across
the board acceptance by all G and E airspace users to a common standard of
electronic position sharing.
I think that's missing the point a bit. There's a growing body of
experience that suggests the opposite, both from .au and from Europe.
It's increasingly clear that you don't need to kit-out the entire fleet
in order to get a significant benefit from FLARM.
Sure, if you cast out a statement like, "To provide 100% coverage
there has to be an across the board acceptance by all G and E airspace
users," then you might have a point. But I don't hear anyone (except
detractors) saying anything like that.
Serious question: What percentage of the fleet would you require to be
outfitted with FLARM before you'd consider that the density of FLARM
traffic was sufficiently high to justify the outlay required to equip
your own aircraft?
I think a little bit of nuance goes a long way. Applying absolutism
to the claims of safety benefits arising from any technology, including
FLARM, sounds like a good way to make sure we never end up with anything
new at all.
(Observers of the IT industry may see various parallels between
this discussion and the last fifteen years of discussion about IPv6,
which has been delayed for such an astounding amount of time by
small groups of nitpickers who think it isn't perfect enough that it's now
too late, and cannot possibly solve the problems it was originally
intended to solve :-)
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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