Cockpit Confusion

COCKPIT CONFUSION By our American correspondent Jim Herd

From my perspective here in the USA, there is a huge and growing plethora of confusion in the soaring cockpit. And I suspect much of this is just as relevant in New Zealand.

We all face a series of signifi cant challenges as we fl y sailplanes. Heck, that’s part of the attraction. Over the past decade or so, a bewildering array of avionics has come to our rescue, or maybe not. It all boils down to a few simple concepts - situational awareness, air traffi c separation, fl ight data computing, and recovery in the event of an accident. All very noble goals, to be sure. But …..

There is a segment of the soaring community (including many Kiwis I know, and you know who you are) that would like to deploy all this stuff out the window while soaring over a convenient rubbish tip. Their mantra is to keep their eyes outside the cockpit. I don’t exactly subscribe to that line of thinking, but they are on to something. Let’s take a look, and you can be the judge if the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, or not.

Most of us could not live without our beloved fl ight computer, so let’s take that as a given, but what about the PDA moving map that often accompanies it? None of us would probably argue about a transponder, partly because it is mandated in many parts of the world (but not in the USA). What about the ELT (another mandate for you folks) 121.5 or 406? With GPS positioning? PLB anyone? Xaon PCAS anyone, for traffi c separation by detecting transponders? SPOT has become a must for most of us, but Spidertracks is greatly superior, even if it does cost a bit more, and it is home-grown Kiwi technology. In the USA, we must now deal with the ADS-B mandate also. More on that later. And of course, who could forget Flarm? For serious cross country missions, many pilots also want a satellite phone, for universal coverage, as well as their trusty cell phone.

And now, let’s contemplate powering all this stuff in the cockpit, along with antennas, power cables, and interconnect cables. And of course, almost none of this stuff is tested or certifi ed to operate with each other, so it will likely ‘cross-talk’, and most of it doesn’t come with explicit installation instructions for your make, model, and cockpit equipment. Uh-oh, I’m starting to get confused. Heck, I haven’t even sat in the cockpit for a ground briefi ng on operating all this stuff yet! Need I say more? Given all the regulatory controls, which differ greatly in each country, there is clearly a pressing need for some rationalisation and consolidation here.

The USA version of Flarm (called PowerFLARM) is perhaps on the right track, because it functions as PCAS and works with mode-C, mode-S, and ADS-B, as well as being a soaring product, with a separate frequency to detect all other gliders so-equipped. But it is brand new this season, and teething troubles are still being worked out.

And then we have the insidious and unspoken factor - what is coming next? Technology has moved incredibly fast in the past decade and is likely to keep accelerating. So anything we buy and install and learn now, may be of limited value if it becomes obsolete in the near term, with better and cheaper products with more integrated functionality. This is what happened to Mode-S in the USA - it was quickly overwhelmed by ADS-B. ADS-B is a profoundly powerful concept that is already sweeping across all of aviation in the USA. The concept is to take much of the workload away from ground-based Air Traffi c Control and place it in the cockpit. That includes weather reporting, terrain awareness, and traffi c separation. By defi nition, you can only do this if every aircraft is ‘squawking’ with some type of new ADS-B box that ‘talks’ to all the other airborne objects. Yikes!

And let’s look at ELTs. The limited data available demonstrates that the new 406ELT technology dramatically reduces false alarms over the old 121.5 models, but 406 makes very little improvement in the actual task of rapidly alerting emergency services to the exact location of a downed aircraft. Why? Simply because the box must fully survive any impact to get its job done, including the antenna, battery, g-switch, electronics, etc. So surely it is past time to dump this fatallyfl awed concept in favour of satellite breadcrumb tracking that does not need to survive to be able to pinpoint a downed aircraft? And yes, I know that 406ELT has been mandated in NZ! I’m sorry to hear that.

The moral of the story for Kiwi soaring is to get ahead of the game and plan your sport’s pathway to the future. You have a manageable sized country and admirable relationships with your governing bodies, so you stand a chance of rationalising this mess. Yes, this is a call to action!