@tggzzz: Yes, I was rather tired when I wrote that post. Especially as the most applicable of the accidents was not one of the two, but the one in which two belgian sailplanes were involved in what was possibly a mid-air collision.
Understood, accepted, and now it is my turn to be tired
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I believe there were also fatalities in the Netherlands, but I would want to check that. That's a side effect of not having flown recently: "loss of currency". Regaining currency normally entails having check flights with instructors, but that is problematic at the moment!
Also, my mind was partially at work. The situation is such: the manufacturers of equipment for ATC and related surveillance could without any problem integrate FLARM into their systems, so that awareness of these participants in the air traffic could be far better. For that, we would need a FLARM license, with which comes the encoding/decoding SW.
FLARM keeps tight control of their software. The software attempts to understand what the pilost are trying to do (e.g. thermal, ridge soar etc) and adjusts the collision warnings appropriately. That requires that all FLARMs are running the same software, i.e. that all FLARM sets have been updated. That is a solid technical reason, even though it annoys open source/API zealots.
This is blocked by some light aviation people who insist that their vehicles should not come under any surveillance except primary radar (which sees them worst and is being thinned everywhere).
Right at the moment, it does not seem as pressing as before, but in the pre-Covid airspace over Europe I consider this an anachronism, as governments and Eurocontrol try to build systems extending their means of awareness and coordination to unmanned systems of decidely smaller size.
The UK has been very different to Europe, historically, about gliding. There was a famous meeting when this was being hammered out in the late 40s/early 50s when the authorities were made to realise that they didn't want responsibility for gliders, and so handed that to the British Gliding Association. The BGA has been extremely competent, technically and in defending gliding interests.
I haven't heard any objections to SSR, except cost and technical practicality. They don't like rich people (airlines) forcing expensive equipment onto General Aviation owners, especially when the GA owners don't get any benefit.
Also, I might have been in Error as I thought that powered ultralights use that system too - have to recheck that.
Not sure about ultralights. Batteries and antenna mounting will be a problem, especially with ultralights and parasails.
And while I do see the power requirements and the cost of conventional transponders as prohibitive, we could perfectly do with read-only access to Flarm, especially when it would be considered to include a once-per-minute message when alone in the air.
See point above about maintaining common functions across all users.
A common point in many of the recent accidents was that ATC was unaware of them. The reasons for this vary, but another sensing tool might be a remedy.
If they are flying in
uncontrolled Class G airspace, then AT
Control don't need to be aware of them and actually don't want to have to be aware of them. Awareness -> control -> responsibility -> too much workload.