The Café thanks Tim Welles of ClearNav Instruments for this announcement—Ed.
ClearNav Instruments is pleased to announce the hiring of David Masson, a well known glider pilot, soaring weather forecaster and programmer in the UK. David’s responsibilities with CNi are to work with other members of our company to improve the reliability, speed and features of our ClearNav Flight Computer.
We welcome David to the ClearNav Team!
David’s impressive qualifications follow:
I had my first flight in 1979, started learning in 1981, and went solo on my 16th birthday. I live in the UK, flying from Lasham and enjoy the challenges of the British weather.
For the last 10 years I have owned an LS6, competition number “LS6”. I have made fairly good use of her, winning the UK 18m nationals in 2003, Enterprise in 2010 and doing pretty well in the BGA national ladder and OLC over the years. I hold the UK 15m distance record and have collected a few trophies for long distance flights. I am determined to do a 1000km in her in the UK. I’m now up to about 2,700 hours, with 600 hours in the last 3 years.
I do gliding forecasts throughout the soaring season. They are supposed to be for the Lasham area, but a “few” others appear to take note of them. I have also been the weatherman for a few national competitions. It’s funny – because I’m not a real met’ man! Well, I’m self taught and have written software to help me. As a sideline I now intend to redevelop that into something really good for aiding forecast and presenting soaring weather.
I have learned how much more quality flying I can do by working around the weather, not being too fussy and making the most of good weather when we get it. If I had a saying it would be, “Take off when it’s soarable and come back when it’s not!”
I enjoy science, maths and clever algorithms and have been developing software for most of my life. I’d claim to be good at writing well structured software that performs. My first major job was dealing in accounting software. For the past nine years I worked as a software engineer for a corporation working on a variety of projects including processing and presenting geospatial and aeronautical data. You could say that I have geared what I’ve learned and what I’m good at towards being able to take on just such a role as I now have with CNi.
