At 09:10 AM 31/01/2007, you wrote:
Mike
I don't think that was entirely fair.
Personally I don't see the continuing development of this product to
broaden its use as limitations or 'expensive work arounds' becoming
apparent.
Certainly I wouldn't like to see any sort of innovation in aviation
safety (flarm or otherwise) limited to what was originally promoted.
Hardly the way to move forward.
Jo
As I'm on record as being in favour of electronically enhanced see
and avoid you shouldn't take this as criticism of such systems in general.
Did you read the original FLARM website stuff?
Are you denying that FLARM was promoted as being simple cheap and
effective with simple installation?
Even requiring transparent antennas on canopies means that lending or
hiring a FLARM for a temporary installation becomes more difficult
and expensive.
Human beings are bad at monitoring where nothing out of the ordinary
happens for long periods of time(the airliner cockpit problem
nowadays). Which is why an electronically enhanced see and avoid
system is desirable. However I think you'll find that human beings
are lazy and if told that much of the traffic conflict risk has been
eliminated(reduced is what they really mean but eliminated is what
they'll think) monitoring of traffic that isn't equipped will be even worse.
This is the human psychology problem with such systems until you get
effective 100% coverage. This means that not only the system must
work but the installation must work. I know how well that's done in
gliding in general(not very). I've seen some pretty ragged looking
ultralights so I don't think it is going to be done any better there
in many cases.
Flarm has been an excellent demonstration of large scale deployment
of an electronic see and avoid system. The thing that made this
possible was the use of a licence free low power radio band but this
also is the basis of the limitations that are becoming apparent.
Unfortunately getting a single world wide frequency for this that
would allow higher output power seems to be extremely difficult. I
hope I'm wrong.
Mike
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