NCYankee wrote:
Most mid air collisions involve a faster airplane overcoming a slower one, often where the slower one is in the pattern and the faster one descends onto the other aircraft. Often only the faster aircraft is going to be able to gain a visual before the collision, but even that is sometimes blocked by fusalage or other structure..
Not sure if pattern midairs are in majority around here… quite a few occur enroute, though I don’t have any hard data at hand.
The traffic around some big city hubs, London, Paris, etc, can be very dense…
For me it is Zurich, my homebase being located below the western TMA veil’s 5’500ft base. The field itself is at 1’300, and if one heads any other direction than say West, the TMA can go as low as 3’000, leaving little airspace available… this compounded with some quite intense aerial activity from all fields around makes flying on nice days a, I sure don’t like using this word, risky affair. Better have a good scan of your traffic alerting devices, and above all an eagle eyed lookout.
Unfortunately the outcome of any midair is seldom as lucky as for these 2 copulating examples…
In France a study shows that between 1989 and 1999 there were 17 mid air collisions.They resulted in 42 deaths and 9 injuries.
Of the 17 case 3 involved collisions between a transport plane and a light aircraft, 3 were between light aircraft and gliders, 11 were between light aircraft and light aircraft.
9 were instruction flights with instructor on board.
2 of the collisions occurred when one of the aircraft was flying IFR.
The worst year was 1993 with 4 collisions.
So should the DGAC or EASA mandate ADSB or some other form of TAS or TCAS in Europe?
Between those years I am not sure whether mode S existed and if so whether it was mandatory for IFR flight in France.
Silvaire wrote:
In those US areas you are likely not talking to ATC anyway when VFR – there is much too much traffic for everybody aloft to be talking to ATC.
There’s no need to talk to ATC, unless you have to. At the most crowded places, there are no ATC, no tower, no nothing. Only lots of different aircraft doing lots different stuff. Discipline and callouts on the radio is what gets it going without accidents. The only thing ADS-B (or similar functionality) would do, would be to scare people off. Too crowded to bother principle.
ADS-B shows aircraft, but doesn’t show intentions. As traffic systems go this is more like cluttering than making order out of it. I have used FLARM a lot, it’s useful, but I don’t see how this will magically solve anything regarding orderly traffic.
Whatever happened to the Google like glasses thing that had some going a few years back?
There seems to be much confusion as to what can be fitted to aircraft and under what certification.
The optimum fit for GA aircraft is Certified ADS-B out and uncertified ADS-B in as it will catch most of the traffic, if you can add FLARM to this mix all the better.
That is my current happy place with a Garmin GTX33ES doing the ADS-B out (certified) and an Air Avionics AT-1 doing the ADS-B in and FLARM in & out. The Garmin GTX33ES was Certified as part of a wider Avionic upgrade and the AT-1 via CS-STAN.
Just for Peter I include a photo of the traffic view when heading towards his home airfield.
That looks like a fairly nice day. I get the same on my Avidyne TAS / TCAS1, just picking up Mode C/S targets.
It might indicate that planes with transponders are also emitting ADS-B OUT (certified or not), but without flying there in my TB20 one can’t tell how many of those have turned off their transponders to avoid getting busted by the CAA.
It would be an interesting experiment to do. I reckon the CAA already has that data because picking up ADS-B is trivial, with a single receiver picking it up over hundreds of miles.
this PC-24 crossed some 3NM in front of me at a healthy speed, at around 9Kft, yesterday 
