Why am I so “careless”? Because, where and when I usually fly, looking for other aircraft in the sky is as much use as looking for a tenner in my wallet after it has fallen into the hands of senior domestic management. 
I can only recall one occasion (16/05/2010) when I was certain that I had all of Scotland’s two and a half million cubic kilometres of Class G airspace to myself, but it’s really not unusual to be sharing it with just a couple of helicopters checking pipelines or ferrying people to hospital.
The risk of colliding with another aircraft may be a few orders of magnitude greater on a Sunday afternoon at Biggin Hill, but on a weekday morning in the Galloway forest – I’m happy just to share that airspace with a few ducks, gulls, ospreys and red kites.
It has already happened for gliders. FLARM is mandatory many places and in many circumstances. But gliding is a converging kind of flying, they tend to naturally flock together, which is not the case for other GA, except in the circuit where things are organized in any case. Flying a glider without looking outside most of the time is also rather counter productive. I don’t think anyone becomes “glued” to the FLARM indicator in a glider.
People looking inside the cockpit instead of outside may be due many things. A moving map is rather captivating all by itself. Poor training; they have never really trained to fly without looking at the instruments. When you have an horizon (a real one), you don’t need anything else to fly perfectly coordinated in a turn, at correct speed, correct descend, correct climb. Instruments are only needed for short glances to see if everything is OK. “Procedural” flying instead of learning to actually handle the airplane will also make people look inside instead of outside.
I also think there is an element of “lack” of legal requirement. To my knowledge there is nothing in the regulation saying that “Thou shall look outside”. All kind of other nonsense stuff there, but no basic principles. It looks to me that people are more concerned about what is “legal” than what makes sense from an airmanship point of view. It also looks more “professional” in certain groups to have lots of instruments in the cockpit.
Peter wrote:
Definitely it would but there are powerful interests against it.
Who are the ‘powerful interests’??
In my opinion this discussion is off track because it fails to identify the particular National environment in which many of the contributors fly.
Whilst electronic devices can lead to a ‘heads in’ behaviour, the outcome is to some extent self regulating because of the number of late sightings that result. Any pilot worth the name will take note of such episodes and adjust his performance accordingly. (And incidentally, while I don’t dispute the ‘heads in’ argument, I believe that tablet navigation is a lot less distracting that the old map & stopwatch approach which, for me at least, carried a high risk of infringement in our complex UK airspace).
To me, the real issue with see and avoid in the UK with it’s complex ground and sky patterns, limited visibility and numerous pinch points is the limited quality of ATC available to VFR traffic. In such terrain in the US, when traffic is likely, I ask for and almost always get flight following. In UK, a VFR request for a traffic service reminds me of the sign once seen in shops: “Don’t ask for credit because the answer may offend”.
Even when a UK controller does provide traffic, the results are often never acquired visually despite careful scanning. In contrast, when a US controller calls traffic, you are meant to see it and they will often call back if you don’t report “in sight”. I think that the poor performance of UK ATC for VFR pilots is the main driver for the plethora of conspicuity devices, all of them well meaning but none having universal applicability. Despite this shoddy service, it’s reported that ATC per movement costs much more in UK than in the US and some of this must be due to the division of the country at low level into numerous little ‘thiefdoms’ each with their own interpretation of what a ‘Basic’ service is.
I’m in no way opposed to looking out of the window. Indeed, it’s why I fly. I know that there are other pilots who can spot more traffic than I do, but to pretend that an average person can match the performance of a good ATC service is disingenuous. We are very fond in UK of puffing up the congestion of our airspace, especially in Mig Alley, but people with that view have often not flown VFR in LA or NY!
So in my view it’s the poor quality of public administration in UK that drives the chaos in VFR flying. Pilots flying the magenta line, or not even asking for a service, or even flying with their transponder off are all trying in their own way to work around an environment where the word ‘infringement’ is uppermost in their minds, not the word ‘collision’.
Finally, I must state the many, many occasions when I have received wonderful help from UK ATC despite the half baked system in which they work. It’s not the people, it’s the mad, arrogant and incompetent bureaucracy that we have to look to for answers. As if…
Happy new year everyone!
Aveling wrote:
Even when a UK controller does provide traffic, the results are often never acquired visually despite careful scanning. In contrast, when a US controller calls traffic, you are meant to see it and they will often call back if you don’t report “in sight”.
That’s not my experience; ATC in the UK seems similar to ATC in the US when it comes to calling traffic and expecting some sort of answer. (I’m talking ‘full ATC’ here either in the ATZ or CAS, not a FISO or A/G radio OCAS).
Cobalt wrote:
– flying VFR in class G looking at phones, iPads and panels for minutes on end – everywhere but outside
I always find this a bit ironic. The GPS should allow you to look outside more, not less.
My ipad allows me to look outside more compared with using a map. It only takes a quick look to verify you’re on course versus a much longer ‘look time’ required to do the same with a paper map. I endeavour to get everything set up before I get to the airfield, so all I need to do is plug it in and turn it on, and the longest I ever need to look at it is if I need to check a frequency or time estimate (which again is quicker than doing it with a paper map).
That’s because you use it correctly. Many pilots don’t (haven’t been taught) and look-in far more often.
Cast your mind back to paper charts – I trust you were taught to fix your position, ascertain a hdg, pick an object on the horizon and aim for it. Using a GPS should be no different for VFR flight with the advantage being that the GPS fixes the position more accurately and allows you to select a more accurate hdg. The problem arises when pilots continuously return (ie every 30 seconds or so) to the GPS to check their track. In essence, they are feature crawling with the Magenta being the feature.
A properly trained pilot will have better lookout using a moving map GPS. There are many who have not been properly trained.
Out of curiosity, do people fail because of lack of lookout?
As an FE I have failed candidates where lack of lookout has been a contributory (not the only) factor in the decision
