Vance Harral

... and if you're actually going to make use of your ground-based nav system - which you should to ensure you're proficient in doing so if backup is needed - I'm increasingly realizing it's just easier do this with a simple nav receiver and traditional CDI. That's a vote for a GNC-215 or -255. Yes, a GTN650 or other GPS/NAV/COM can be switched to "green needles" for ground-based nav; and you can set an OBS course on a G5/G3X/whatever. But this turns out to be fairly complex and irritating to do vs. how things work with older equipment. So much so that a few pilots I fly with who have decades of experience, are well-versed in traditional VOR/ILS operations, and also well-versed in using their high-end GPS navigator, actually have trouble setting up a simple VOR course on them. It's not that they don't understand how VORs work, it's just trouble with the number of button pushes/clicks/touchscreen events in the navigator and EFIS to get to the menu that selects the frequency and sets the course selector. The most operationally useful airplanes I fly for IFR have high-end navigators and electronic HSI displays for NAV1 - which stays in GPS mode pretty much exclusively; and an old-school KX-155 or GNC-255 with mechanical CDI indicator for NAV2.

Modern AI is almost entirely based on those same neural network principles. It's been mostly rebranded as "deep learning", but the "deep" in that jargon phrase doesn't indicate anything philosophical. It's just that the number of ranks in the neural network (i.e. it's depth) can be significantly larger, due to the availability of dramatically higher compute power. In particular, the simple-but-highly-parallel vector processors developed for high-end computer graphics in the late 90s and early 2000s turn out to be really good at neural net calculations. In 2006, Nvidia rolled out a programming library called CUDA to facilitate doing this on their GPU chips, and they've been an AI darling ever since. I'm not smart enough to know what effect all that has on modern weather forecast modeling, so I'll refrain from commenting on that. But whatever dead end neural networks ran into back in the 90s have long since been plowed wide open.

There is no set screw that I recall, at least not in our 76 F model. My recollection is that the little white plastic trim indicator is not attached to the cable except by compression fit. if you remove the transparent cover plate that covers the indicator (just conventional screws to do so), you can slide the indicator up and down on the cable with your fingers. Not easily, but with some force. Having said that, it's possible there is indeed a set screw in the indicator that I don't recall or didn't see, and I was just brute-force sliding it. Regardless of whether there's a set screw or just compression fit, if the indicator gets hung up in its sliding track somehow, moving the trim wheel in the nose down position will simply pull the cable out of the indicator. The indicator may later vibrate loose out of whatever is causing it to hang up in the track. If that happens, then rather than being secured to the cable, the indicator rides on top of it. This "sorta" still works, except that now (1) the indicator indicates more nose up trim than you actually have; and (2) as it gets hung/unhung in the track, it can exhibit the kind of random hysteresis @bixmooney is reporting. Sound advice. But when we had this problem, there was nothing wrong with the cable and its housing, and no need to remove and lubricate the cable itself. The only "hangup" was the little white trim indicator itself, and the track it rides in. Some fibers and grime had gotten into the track over the years, causing it to bind up. After cleaning and lubricating the indicator and track, all was well.

I didn't get a windscreen full of airplane, but have indeed been the guy making beautiful announcements on the wrong frequency twice (that I know of) in my CTAF career. It's a humiliating mistake. It's also made me a lot more humble about calling other pilots idiots and imbeciles. Anyway, I must have missed the multiple choice the first time around, and looks like you can't change a vote once made; but you should add one to the "I was in a NORDO aircraft causing it" category. This is the heart of the concern, but I'm not sure how anyone can truthfully answer the question. People who bemoan the NORDO conundrum are always going to claim that radio communication would have prevented the conflict in their particular sob story. But there's no way to be certain of this, and plenty of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. For example, @PeteMc's story above has nothing to do with radio equippage, or failure/refusal to use that equipment. It's just a pilot who lacked SA, made a bad plan, broadcast his bad plan, and proceeded to make position reports while executing his bad plan. That's not a NORDO problem. On the contrary, it is in fact a radio "success", because at least the bad guy's CTAF broadcasts gave others a heads-up about his lack of SA.

Couple of questions about the poll: Can you elaborate on what you mean by "conflict"? If you mean, "I would have died in a midair except for aggressive maneuvering", then I've never had a conflict like that with a NORDO aircraft. If you mean, "I had to adjust my traffic pattern to a degree bordering on unreasonable", then yeah I've had those sorts of conflicts with NORDO aircraft. Also with aircraft equipped and using the radio as well, but that's a different question. Second, does the "has radio but wasn't using" option include pilots that are trying to use the radio and failing due to pilot error/equipment malfunction? Or only the SOB that has a functioning radio and knows how to use it, but just stubbornly refuses to do so? ETA: can you make the poll multiple choice? More than one of the answers applies to me, and probably to others.

As I said in the OP, there's nothing to agree or disagree with, and no particular conclusion to be drawn. I'm just curious to see what people say bothers them, and thought others might be as well. I'm definitely not going argue that the poll indicates anything at all about what's safe, or how pilots should behave or feel. Replies are dying down, and the results are predictably bell shaped. Looks like most folks "draw the line" somewhere inside of one mile lateral and inside 500' vertical. But it's worth noting that as of this writing, 3 out of 26 respondents are uncomfortable with other airplanes inside 2nm lateral and/or 1000' vertical. So even here in a group of Mooney owners, roughly 1 in 10 pilots have pretty conservative feelings relative to the median. For what it's worth, this roughly mimics my flight instruction experience. I fly with 10-20 different clients per year, and a small handful of them are bothered by airplanes that seem to me to be too far away to worry about. If they ask me something like, "Didn't that seem close to you?", I say no, and try to have a respectful conversation with them about why. It's possible some of them change their opinion as a result of those conversations. But human nature being what it is, I think it's more likely they conclude I'm fatalistic, and/or not very smart.

Yours is a fine opinion, but not one shared by a few of my flight instruction clients, folks in FBO lobbies, and various posts on various aviation boards. Hence the original motivation for the poll. The criticism of poll choices is fair, but polling is a complicated endeavor. One must provide broad enough choices to span the range of possible responses, but not so many choices that the granularity prevents determining if there's any kind of consensus. So far, the poll seem to be settling in the "I can read the N number" range. I'm not too surprised at this, given that the sample group is comprised largely of pilots who own fast, complex singles, and have significant flying experience. My guess is that I'd get somewhat different answers from a student pilot audience. There's also the issue of what people say makes them nervous in the comfort of their office on the ground, vs. what actually does make them nervous in the air. A number of pilots I've flown with don't seem to really have any idea how far away another aircraft is, and can't estimate how long it would be to impact if they were actually on a collision course. This is especially true when their only information about the threat is its depiction on a traffic display.

This is the reason I have a hard time getting worked up about NORDO traffic. I'm convinced that most of the airplanes the pearl-clutching crowd thinks are NORDO, actually do have one or more radios onboard. But honest mistakes are made tuning or flip-flopping radios (and ironically, it's sometimes the person complaining that's actually on the wrong frequency). Sometimes the receiving pilot turned down their radio volume and forgot to turn it up. Sometimes the transmitting pilot has a mic or audio panel problem they haven't recognized. Sometimes the person complaining that an offending aircraft "made no CTAF calls" simply missed the call(s) actually made by the "offender" - and by the way, this sort of miss is made increasingly likely the more that everyone wants to have lengthy conversations on the CTAF about what their plans are for the next several minutes, and negotiating deconfliction with some other airplane nearby in the pattern on which they've fixated. I've seen every one of these situations as an instructor, and - gasp - committed a few of them myself in 35 years of flying. Bottom line, the idiot you think is NORDO may indeed be an idiot. But the odds they're actually NORDO just because it's legal to do so, are pretty low.

Portable ADS-B receivers are more susceptible, but they're not the only reason for ghost targets. You can get ghosts even with a panel-mounted ADS-B in/out transponder, and even when Foreflight knows the N number of your ownship. Most manufacturers of traffic displays have a little treatise on it. Foreflight's is at https://support.foreflight.com/hc/en-us/articles/225240087-Why-do-I-see-a-false-or-ghost-traffic-target-in-ForeFlight-Mobile . Garmin's plays it closer to the vest, but if you dig, you can find some posts about this from Garmin employees on Beechtalk and elsewhere. In my experience, ghosts seem to be correlated with maneuvering. I do a lot of maneuvering as a CFI, and my recollection is that ghosts tend to show up during steep turns, steep spirals, lazy 8s, etc. I'm sure whatever processing takes place in the stack is biased toward straight and level-ish flight.

Same at Longmont. But my one of my favorite instrument scenarios around these parts is to pretend it's 400 OVC (every great once in a while it actually is); and that we've decided to depart anyway (not unreasonable, given that in the event of a problem shortly after takeoff, there are three airports within a few minutes' flying time with precision approaches to 200' AGL). Controlled airspace starts at 700' AGL. If you're in the soup at 400' AGL, you can't VOCA, and you've got 300' of climb during which your only guidance is the ODP. This gets more interesting when the prescribed heading for entering controlled airspace is different from the radial intercept heading prescribed by the ODP (it usually is, though often not by much). All this makes for a busy departure workload: into the soup almost immediately after takeoff, right at the point you're supposed to start your ODP-prescribed turn. You already need to be thinking about identifying GLL if you've chosen to actually use your VOR radio for the ODP. And then, while possibly still in the original turn, a new turn to the ATC-prescribed "on entering controlled airspace" heading at 700' AGL. Between 700' AGL and 1000' AGL, you should be switching to the departure frequency and attempting to check in, but note that they probably can't hear you until about 1200' AGL. Don't forget your post-takeoff checklist, generally at 1000' AGL. If it's a simulated IMC training flight where I'm pretending to be Denver Approach, I'll often fail to respond to the pilot's initial check-in attempt(s), and see what they do. Hold heading while waiting a few seconds and trying again? Turn back to the ODP intercept heading to re-acquire the ODP? Try to figure out what the "vector" rules for lost comm mean when the heading you were vectored onto actually takes you away from the course in your clearance? It's a fun exercise, and really healthy for gaining proficiency and confidence. Mostly what I want to see is that the pilot (a) verifies they're steering away from the big rocks just west of the airport; and (b) does something decisive and reasonable, without panic or brain lock.

That's a really great-looking airplane! Love the colors.

I respect these fears, provided the person expressing the concern understands display zoom scale. I also find them frustrating, because every single "near miss on the tablet without visually acquiring" incident I've had, was one in which the threat target appeared out of nowhere, then disappeared from the display altogether a few seconds later. I've had about a dozen of these in the last 5-ish years. I'm 95% sure they were all ghost targets caused by failed ADS-R/ownship reconciliation, rather than real threats. Because of this, I'm no longer startled when a threat suddenly appears on the display at my same altitude, and I'm not particularly concerned about it. I do look outside intently, but that's the limit of my panic. If I ever die in a MAC that I "should" have seen coming, I suppose it might be because of complacency about ghost targets.

There's no ulterior motive in this poll, and probably no useful conclusions to be drawn. I'm just generally curious, and figured I and others might be surprised by the responses. Note that there is no universally "correct" answer, and I'm explicitly requesting that respondents refrain from criticizing other's votes. Assume you're flying in a relatively busy metropolitan area, and you recognize converging traffic, that winds up passing "close" by you. At what point does the event change from an everyday occurrence you've forgotten by the time you're tying down, to a scary story you tell for weeks/months/years after? For the purposes of this poll, it doesn't matter whether you initially acquired the threat visually or on ADS-B, and it doesn't matter how/if you maneuver to avoid them. Assume we're talking about piston single speeds here - maximum closure rate of 300 knots in the worst case, head-on scenario; but more realistically in the range of 100 knots. At what point does your sphincter tighten, and you feel compelled to "do something": maneuver, cuss, yell on the radio, whatever?

This may or may not be allowed by their rules, but I'm not a controller. Controllers have a tough job, I have great respect for them. But they're only human, and sometimes they get it wrong. Last week, I listened to what was obviously a new student pilot, struggling to read back a taxi clearance at a multi-runway towered airport, that involved crossing one runway and holding short of another. This airport is known for training ops, students need taxi and pattern/landing clearances repeated probably 100 times per day. The instructor on board was allowing the student to struggle. It was a busy day, so maybe that was a bad call by the instructor. But it's essentially always busy, and I've done similar (how else to learn?) It wasn't so busy that safety was compromised - at least not in my opinion. After the 3rd readback mistake, the controller was over it. Fair enough. The appropriate action would seem to be calmly saying something like, "Nxxxx, have your instructor read back your taxi clearance". Instead, the controller groused on frequency, "Nxxxx, your instructor isn't doing you any favors!" They probably thought this was an appropriate tough-love message to the instructor. But from my 3rd-party vantage point, what it accomplished was to teach the student their instructor was unreliable, and also that the student should fear controllers even more than they obviously already did. Not a great look, and if I'd been sitting in the right seat I'd have been righteously P.O.'d about it.

With due respect, I can only say that this opinion seems to be based on narrow experience. You know the biggest flight training schools in the world all operate out of towered, airports, right? KDVT, KPRC, KDAB, KGFK to name a few. Have you been to any of those towered airports? Ever been to KBJC in the Denver area during the weekday morning "push" of students from ATP? I've flown at 4 of these 5 airports at least once, and the mix of brand-new student pilots (some with poor command of English), and low-time instructors, makes for some pretty amazing experiences. You know that arguably xenophobic joke about the student pilot who responds to, "Say on course heading", with "Rog-ah, on course heading!!!"? That's not a joke to me. As God is my witness, I actually heard this exchange take place between tower and an outbound UND aircraft, while inbound to KGFK. Other than that, I respect, appreciate and agree with everything else said in your last post.

I've tried internet searching this on a couple of occasions, and have never found a Paul-Bertorelli-style scientific treatment. The best info I have is the accident stuff that shows up in my FIRC, which is pretty sparse. Mostly what the data indicates is that mid-airs are rare events, which makes them hard to analyze statistically. To study the last 50 mid-airs in the United States, you'd probably have to look back at least a decade, and if you try to use data from 2014, people will understandably (and maybe correctly) argue that the world is different now. For what it's worth, I'm aware of four mid-airs in the Denver Metro area since I moved here in 1997. None occurred in the traffic pattern at an uncontrolled airport. One occurred in the traffic pattern of a controlled airport (KAPA, 2021). One occurred under the shelf of the Denver Class B, involving two aircraft that both departed controlled airports (KAPA and KBJC, 2003), one of which was receiving flight following and the other not. The other two accidents (2012 and 2022) involved airplane pairs that both departed uncontrolled fields, but the actual collisions occurred several thousand feet and several nautical miles away from any airport. So four MACs in 27 years, but in three of the four, the airport environment wasn't a factor. This is anecdotal data involving only one metropolitan area, so not really any good for statistical analysis. But even so, I feel pretty confident saying there is "no evidence" that controlled airports are statistically less likely to experience a MAC vs. uncontrolled airports. Again, if someone has actual data to the contrary - as opposed to just their personal scary story - I'm all ears.

I agree that programming this into a modern navigator is a good "mental push-ups", exercise that helps you become even more familiar with your equipment. Having said that, I confess to feeling a bit old-man-ish about an ODP that involves nothing more than flying a heading to intercept a VOR radial. Even though I'm pretty proficient with my GTN650, I find it to be less trouble and less distracting to "program" these sorts of ODPs simply by setting the appropriate frequency and OBS in my #2 VOR prior to departure, and leaving the GTN out of the equation. I take off, climb to the prescribed turn altitude, turn to the prescribed heading, ident the VOR and wait for the CDI needle to center. One reason I like this strategy is that in large metropolitan areas with Diverse Vector Areas, ATC is often going to vector you off the ODP as soon as you check in with them anyway. Because of this, having the ODP in your primary navigator ahead of your cleared route is arguably irrelevant. It can actually be a distraction, though not much one for anyone proficient with flight-plan-ology. My strategy does assume one is comfortable with a good old fashioned VOR receiver and CDI, and I've certainly had a few clients with fancy avionics, who just aren't. They really need the comfort of a magenta line on a moving map to feel confident they're not going the wrong way. And in some cases, they just really, really want to be able to fly everything with an autopilot, which can add challenges based on the autopilot's connectivity with one or both VOR receivers. So yeah, I can and do teach them how to paint a VOR radial with their GPS - you've got to meet people where they're at. But those clients are also the ones most likely to suffer an unfortunate, simulated #1 navigator failure during training.

Again, I don't find this to be true in practice for people who most need the training. The visual display is similar, but the interface just isn't. Think about what's required to set a VOR course using the (virtual) "OBS knob" on a G5 vs. a GDU 700. Or to set a heading bug and the baro setting (two independent knobs on a dual G5, one singular knob on the GDU).

If you're fortunate enough to have a modern com radio, it can often "monitor" the audio of the standby frequency (muting it when there is audio on the primary). And you probably already have your standby tuned to the CTAF of the place you're going, so this is easy-peasy. I teach this trick a lot.

One interesting thing to discuss in this thread is, "How close is close?" For better or worse, people with a lot of experience - particularly experience at uncontrolled fields - have a much less conservative definition of "close" and/or "crazy". Things that I don't think are unsafe or scary, bother other pilots. Not saying I'm right and they're wrong, it's just an honest difference of opinion. About a month ago, my airplane partner and I were ready for takeoff at our uncontrolled airport, on an unusually slow afternoon. The only two aircraft on frequency were ourselves, and an airplane inbound on a practice VOR-A approach. It's important to understand the nature of this VOR-A approach: it's perpendicular to the only runway, has an MAP directly over the center of the field, and has an MDA that is 600 feet above the ground. I've flown the approach many times myself, it hasn't changed in decades. I know exactly where the approach path is, where the missed is, and where airplanes flying it are likely to be, including error tolerances for pilots new to instrument work. The inbound aircraft had been making good position reports on the way in, and I had their target on ADS-B. Shortly after they called, "3 miles south", we called entering the runway, for takeoff. The inbound aircraft immediately responded, reported 2.5 miles south, and actually issued us an instruction to hold short while they completed their approach. I didn't want to be a jerk, but I did politely say something to the effect of, "We're not a conflict, we can't climb to your altitude by the time you're here, and we won't be in the approach path anyway. Departing Runway XX." The other pilot was highly offended by this, fired off a mini rant about how this was "just completely unsafe", and announced they were breaking off the approach early to avoid us. They undoubtedly went home - almost certainly to their towered airport - and told their friends about those jerks at uncontrolled airports that just do whatever the f**k they want with no regard for safety. I see the same sort of thing with the local jump plane, which descends from "divers away" at thousands of FPM, and at indicated airspeeds approaching 2x of the typical 172. They will sometimes pass other aircraft on a wide, descending downwind to slot themselves forward into a perfectly reasonable empty space (especially given the 747-size patterns some of the piston singles fly). This looks perfectly safe and reasonable to those of us who operate here every day. It seems crazy to someone who has never seen it. Occasionally there is an indignant "you cut me off" complaint on the radio about this, and I'd bet more than one report has been filed over the 20+ years they've been doing this. The FAA has never done anything about these reports, to my knowledge, and most of us like it that way. A good place to observe differing opinions about "close" is on the recently-established practice area frequency in our high-density training area. I wish the pilots on it would just report their position, and refrain from having ATC-style interactive conflict resolution conversations. But I try to play nice. Anyway, I'll sometimes get a call from some other aircraft, "Nxxxxx, are you on frequency?" I can tell the other aircraft wants to play the conflict resolution game. But sometimes that other airplane is 5nm away, and we're both in 172s. If we immediately turned head on toward each other, it would be 2+ minutes before we were anywhere even remotely in the vicinity of a MAC. 5nm isn't remotely "close" to me, but I'm sure it looks kinda threatening to the low-time students (and instructors) at the local, towered-airport flight school, who have never operated without ADS-B and who don't really understand the zoom scale on their EFB. I know essentially nothing about ag ops, but I suspect some of the same things are at play in some of these ag plane conflict stories. Ag pilots are flying highly maneuverable aircraft, and are proficient in aggressive, low-level maneuvering flight. That doesn't excuse the pilot in @Schllc's story, because they were unquestionably a jerk. But I wouldn't be surprised, if one talked to him/her about it, that s/he would say the "near miss" was actually nothing of the sort. Again, to be perfectly clear, I am not saying the ag pilot was right and Schllc was wrong. What I'm saying is that you observe something that seems scary at an uncontrolled airport, and decide to take your marbles and go home because of it, you subsequently lose out on the opportunity to observe a lot of "scary stuff" happen without any actual problem. But that's everyone's right, and if doing so makes you feel safer, more power to you. We're fortunate to live in a country that supports both towered and untowered operations.

And sometimes adding a tower makes an airport less safe and efficient, despite what I'll charitably assume are legitimate intentions. Such has been the case at KFNL. When that tower is in operation, they close the crosswind runway, and require all pattern operations to be west of the main runway, because - get this - that's the only direction they can see. The "tower" is actually nothing more than a trailer, a transmitter, and a guy/gal with binoculars. They also direct all inbound traffic to sequence over a singular point, driving all inbound traffic to close into conflict. I grant this is a special case, but it goes to @Schllc's question of, "Why have ATC if it doesn't make things safer?" The real answer is that ATC is added based on arguments of safety, that sometimes turn out to be more grounded in politics or other factors, rather than any actual safety. One could just as well say, "Obviously presidential TFRs are legitimate, why would we even have them if they're not protecting the president"?

If you're talking about the full-blown GAT that runs on a PC, not very often. The challenge with it is that the folks who would benefit the most, are generally too distracted by the fact that I can't make it exactly match their panel. Mainly this involves the ADI/HSI display, but I also can't model the GNS navigators in it. The PFD/MFD options in the trainer are the GDU 620 or the TXi system, but common equippage amonst my clients is G5/GI-275. I can point out that a GDU 620 PFD is more or less the same view you'd get on a pair of G5s, but the buttons are different. But the people who are fine with this are already pretty savvy with advanced avionics. The people who most need training have a hard enough time with the equipment in their actual airplane, and the distraction of operating something different in the trainer is generally a net loss. For the navigator, I can tell someone that the logic in a GTN is the same as the GNS. But this is a hard sell, between the legitimate differences in the UI, and the inevitable "I hate touchscreens" side dish served up by the client. So I have to go back to the really ancient PC trainer for the GNS navigators, or convince them to pony up $65/hour for the Redbird simulator at our local flight school - which has one simulated airplane that models GNS navigators and steam-gauge ADI/HSI, but almost never matches their airplane, much less their panel. Adding all that up, the promise of simulation is usually greater than the actual benefit. It's too bad, because I think simulation is a great tool. I do wish Garmin would undertake the singular effort to add the "little" ADI/HSI instruments into their GAT (G5 and GI-275), but I'm not holding my breath. Guessing there are technical challenges in doing so. Really this just goes back to the baseline problem with advanced avionics training, which is that there's so much variation in the operation of each gizmo, that it's a problem even for the simulators and trainers. It's diverse enough within the Garmin universe, that even Big G can't seem to release a trainer that covers the most common GA equippage.

Best point from this good post. The crab angle and ground speeds you observe leading up to landing are not necessarily indicative of the wind you'll experience in the flare. That doesn't mean you should wait until the last second for a go-around if you don't like what you're seeing. But there's also nothing wrong with continuing an approach from 400' AGL to 100' AGL to see if the winds are more favorable closer to the ground.

Right. At towered airports, you're (mostly) obligated to do what others tell you. Such as be turned onto final at the same time other traffic is on the same final and have to take evasive action. Such as be told "do a 360" at the base corner, over the top of other traffic inappropriately vectored in on a long base, and asking for you to turn your back to all the other traffic; then not be given instructions what to do afterward, and causing a TCAS RA for the jet on final (this happened to me just last month). Those are just a couple of my towered airport stories. All the things you say about untowered airports are true, and increase risk. But you're suffering from the illusion that towered airports are consequently "safer". On the contrary, they just have different risks. They're often even busier, causing more traffic density, more potential conflicts, and added workload to pilots to follow instructions that can't always be predicted or anticipated. More importantly, the tower controllers are human, too. Sometimes they have a bad day, just like people on the CTAF. Sometimes they're on the wrong frequency, just like people on the CTAF. Sometimes they're trainees, just like people on the CTAF. All of those things increase risk, too, and I've experienced all of them. The last midair in the Denver metro area was at KAPA, a busy towered airport. There's never been a midair in the traffic pattern at my local uncontrolled field. Yeah, yeah, I know, you're going to tell me the guy at KAPA in the Cirrus was an idiot and "failed to follow instructions". But he thought he did what he was told, safe in the warm embrace of a tower controller. So both types of airport have risks. There's no evidence in accident data that one kind is actually safer with respect to bending metal, maiming, and death. Just a bunch of anecdotes from people that like one or the other, almost always for no reason other than that's what constitutes the bulk of their experience. If you've got actual data to refute this, I'm open to discussion. But for every crazy story you've got at an untowered field, I've got one at a towered field, and without data we're just talking past each other.

Nothing wrong with that, but let me present you with a real-life scenario that requires some challenging ADM. It's a busy day at uncontrolled KLMO (which it nearly always is). You arrive at the airport the morning after your ski trip, listen to the AWOS, and winds are 160 at 5 knots, technically favoring runway 11 with a 3-knot headwind component. You notice the pattern is full of aircraft using Runway 29. Per your personal minimums, you broadcast on the CTAF, "Mooney is taxiing for runway 11". Someone responds, "Traffic is using 29". You call again that you're taxiing for 11, and no one responds. You key up again from the runup area with, "Anyone want to switch runway direction?", and someone finally takes pity on you and says, "per local procedures, Runway 29 is favored in light winds" (there's an actual reason for this, but no explanation is offered to you on the CTAF). How long will you sit in the runup area for Runway 11 waiting for reasonable spacing to take off, or for the winds to change? 5 minutes? 10? 30? This is not a made-up scenario, it's real life at my home 'drome. How principled are you? Do you know if you can safely take off from the 4800' runway in your airplane, on that day, at your weight?