Thu May 16, 2019 10:18 pm
#1694054
I am a bit of a heretic when it comes to EC.
I am not a luddite, I am a professional sotware developer and technically savvy, but I do believe that its popularity here, and with regulators, has more to do with “this something that we can do now” rather than real risk mitigation.
Sure the mk1 eyeball is not completely reliable, nothing is.
Maybe, as someone said it misses 70% of targets, but that is not really the criteria to judge it by.
Sure the idea of mid-air collision is horrific, but what is that risk?
Mid-airs are unusual. If this was really about risk mitigation rather than shiny tech, wouldn’t mandating flying with a parachute or fitting BRS as mandatory be equally valid responses to the risk?
I do not assume that my lookout is perfect, but it and the big sky has worked so far and mostly does.
Mid-air collisions are fortunately rare, I think that most mid-air collisions happen close to airports, in the circuit, not a time when you should be head down watching for electronic traffic, or even concentrating on the audio.
I have held off buying a device for practical reasons as well as philosophical, my cockpit is a pretty hostile environment for loose articles and GPS related things GPS gets confused by aerobatics.
Thankfully the sample size for these incidents is so tiny that statistics don’t work very well, so I am not sure what the answer is, but throwing away the freedom to fly non-radio, non-transponder seems like a loss to me, even though my aeroplan has a radio and a transponder. Is EC worth that loss? I think that there is no data to say that it is, only anecdote.