RobertL18C wrote:
His mistake was not to have departed on crosswind at circuit altitude, but to have climbed to his cruising altitude (?) in the ATZ presumably on a crosswind track.
Are there prescriptive or even expected ways to depart from an airfield? I always climb to cruise if only to minimize noise footprint,. I just avoid crossing the circuit at circuit height and generally avoid the overhead if possible (not the case at Stapleford for example)
IMO where there is no service of any sort (not in this case I appreciate) I think pilots are quite poor at making sufficient blind calls – after all it can do little harm assuming the frequency isnt too busy, and if it is that busy even more important to at least make clear what you are doing.
I can never understand why pilots dont turn on the landing light as a matter of course – it does make you a great deal more visable.
Experience tells us that departures and arrivals seem to be the time when these type of events are far more likely to occur. You can do little more than make sure your look out is really effective and proactive at these times. It is noticeable that pilots are often pretty fixated on a forward look out during the initail climb out which I think is a mistake, and inclined to forget the traffic will almost certainly be higher.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
I can never understand why pilots dont turn on the landing light as a matter of course – it does make you a great deal more visable.
SOP for me.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
I can never understand why pilots dont turn on the landing light as a matter of course – it does make you a great deal more visable.
Because schools (at least the one where I learned) don’t teach you that. Maybe with the LEDs it will change but I think they were worried about wear and them going off.
Noe wrote:
Because schools (at least the one where I learned) don’t teach you that. Maybe with the LEDs it will change but I think they were worried about wear and them going off.
As soon as you start training for IFR suddenly that changes. Now it’s pitot heat and landing light on when entering the runway and the landing light goes on once you start the approach. At least my experience with instructors in Germany.
Some interesting comments. Thank you. I have about 300 hours in my logbook and have been based at two very busy airfields. I have seen lots of non-conflicted traffic in the past. This was different : (1) almost head on, (2) unannounced, (3) coming from a direction that I was not imagining could have traffic (although I looked), (4) inside an ATZ, and (5) very fast (6) the point of closest approach was close. (Wide-angle lenses compress the size of the image of course.) The only good thing was that it was over in a flash.
I fly with my landing and taxi lights (and pitot heat) on all the time. (They are shown as on in the video.) Why not do this? It’s not as if anyone is going to be dazzled, and it does help to make my plane just a little more conspicuous, but sadly, not by very much. (Little planes are very small when far away..and a 250kt closing speed is really uncomfortably fast for a small object which is often painted white…)
Airborne_Again wrote:
I see that you use a portable FLARM with antennas inside the aircraft. My (admittedly short) experience with the same setup is that it is next to useless inside a metal aircraft. I’ve seen the range to a mode C/S target change by many miles just by banking my aircraft towards or away from the target.(Is QFE still commonly used in the UK?)
1) My portable PowerFlarm seems to work remarkably well in detecting transponder traffic, without an external antenna. But perhaps I only see what it sees and not what it doesn’t see – Maybe I need to test that more. I imagine it must be expensive to get an externally mounted antenna fitted for this purpose or is there a cheap non-certified way to do this for this non-certified traffic detection device?
2) QFE is in standard use at all non-CAT, non-military airports in the UK, as far as I can tell, and a UK CAT airport will it seems, pass the QFE as a matter of course if asked. PPL training in the UK trains pilots to land on the QFE.
Out of interest why would you have your pitot heat on all the time Howard?
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Out of interest why would you have your pitot heat on all the time Howard?
I have it on all the time because the UK is often pretty cold, and every 1000 feet is about 2 degrees centigrade cooler than the ground, and I fly through cloud a bit and I don’t want to forget to turn it on when I need to. When I was doing my IMC rating the instructor advised to turn it on before every flight as part of the pre-flight check, so I figured it’s ok to do so and might be safer too. I can’t see a downside, although someone here might put me right on that.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Why would you have your pitot heat on all the time Howard?
Out of interest, if you are an IFR pilot, why would you not?
Howard wrote:
I fly with my landing and taxi lights (and pitot heat) on all the time. (They are shown as on in the video.) Why not do this?
If I remember correctly, you don’t fly IFR (yet), do you? Flying IFR in CAS, especially in cruise, I don’t leave it on.
I leave it on when approaching the circuit, on take off, or when some conflict reported, but turn it off when flying IFR in CAS. Wondering if at night it could be confused with a tail light and generate confusion.
Pitot goes on before entering the runway, and goes off after exiting the runway (wheels and not wings supporting the plane!)
