Garret's Reasons to have the Juniors Fly with ClearNav Instruments.

The ClearNav system offers many great benefits; ease of use, reliable, and tactical advantages. These reasons made it an easy choice for the U.S. Junior team flying at the JWGC to build panels and pack them to Australia. The 3 cirrus' we had all had ClearNav's, two of them had CNv. The U.S. Junior pilots were incredible happy with them. Boyd has always used a CAI 302 and has always been impressed with it. JP was used to his club LS-6 having an SN10. But they were blown away with how much better the varios were. All of the systems worked flawlessly and we could not have been happier with their performance. The vario is very accurate and truly does feel like it is flying by the seat of the pants. Other instruments claim to do the same but I feel they come up short.

The Junior team did very well on the turn area days, partially because these are tasks we are very familiar with. Also the ClearNav gives valuable information on where to turn and how not to have wasted miles. This should be an important note for all of you racing pilots out there, look at your flights, many pilots will make an arc into a turn area, flying extra miles that do not help your scored distance (more to be discussed at the SSA convention). Many instruments give a lot of features that sound great for advertising. However the real question is do they make you go faster or farther? That is what we want out of a flight computer information to increase our speed. The glide-amoeba is a quick reference to see how the glide to landable strips is trending. This is a simple, safe and effective way of showing what's is going on. It allows us to fly faster by using less energy thinking about safe landing options. The leader line shows a simple reference so we do not add extra inefficient miles on a turn area. The screen is bright and easy to read. The power consumption was low which was good because our plan was only one battery per glider. We used K2 lithium batteries and even with all of the "chatter" team flying we never got a low battery. It was a lot of work to swap panels, but the end result was worth every moment.

 Garret Willat holds a flight instructor rating with over 8000 hours in sailplanes. His parents have owned Sky Sailing Inc. since 1979. He started instructing the day after his 18th birthday. Since then, Garret has represented the US Junior team in 2003 and 2005. He graduated from Embry-Riddle with a bachelor's degree in Professional Aeronautics. Garret represented the US Open Class team in 2008 and 2010 and the Club Class team in 2014. Garret has won 3 US National Championships.