Steve6443 wrote:
He was overtaking me on my left, climbing to meet me.
If you had visual contact it is even better.
Apart from the aircraft I was cleared to descend on top of, I had another scare with the TIS when a King Air departed behind me (I was IFR he was VFR) and was closing in really fast, with such a closing rate, and so close, that he triggered an alarm at Paris Control and scared the hell out of me.
I am just saying that one should think about how to handle conflicts detected by the TIS that you are unable to acquire visually. Given the poor bearing, I think that you have the choice between climbing or descending.
Canuck wrote:
Recently I had someone pull onto the runway while I was on VERY short final, I was also upset about how ‘close’ it was. Clearly they didn’t look, nor listen to the radio.
Canuck wrote:
but no one has the ‘right’ to a particular bit of air at a specific time
Sorry, Canuck, this is simply wrong. The landing aircraft has the right of way. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look out and act accordingly, but there are rules for operating on and around airports and they are there for good reason.
That aside, what irks me in the case described by the OP is that the motor glider obviously must have been on frequency and chose to remain silent. This is an attitude I simply don’t get. If you are flying close to an airfield (and not talking to Info/App/Dep), then for crying out loud at least tune in and at the very least announce position and intentions.
Canuck wrote:
Second, the approaching aircraft would have been to your right hand side and in front of you while you were on base! Did you look ahead and to the right before turning final? This is your responsibility as well as his. For example, he might have seen you cross overhead and thought you were no conflict (radio calls notwithstanding). You then turned in parallel and above him, who knows what his canopy obstructs, he might not be able to see you? You can argue SERA rules and where he should have been all you want, but if you have a mid-air and are dead it doesn’t matter. Radio calls DO NOT alleviate a look out.
Excellent point on this one. Strangely enough, I do look when joining circuits, my instructor drilled that into me, if nothing else, but I didn’t look down, I just looked out, at circuit height or maybe slightly higher, slightly lower, to see if others were joining. However I’m doubtful I would have seen him because a) I’m on the left of the aircraft, b) he was significantly lower than me when my unit picked him up and c) my aircraft has low wings.
The motor glider was a Scheibe SF 25C Falke, if you google that, you’ll see it has an excellent visibility above which leads me to question whether he saw me, after all, he then flew across my track and climbed through my final approach course….
If I’m being perfectly honest, I didn’t actually believe my system was registering a target, instead I was pretty sure that it was an aircraft with a transponder switched on, whose altitude encoder was defective…..
edited to say: if my radio wasn’t transmitting, I wouldn’t have received the landing information nor had the wind direction called out when I called final 
172driver,
My apologies, that was a bad example, but I was recalling the grey area of life while writing text, which you took quite literally. There were a couple of options for my incident, it was closer than I wanted for comfort but I was still able to go around. I also would have been able to land in a trajectory diverging from the runway (it was a large grass field).
Sure, the landing aircraft has right of way, but how would the AAIB/NTSB report be written up? Aircraft A on the ground didn’t see Aircraft B on final (either by neglect or obscured vision from the cockpit). Aircraft B on final saw aircraft A on the ground, but then landed on them? This is nonsensical. Even though the landing aircraft has the right of way, they still ‘have’ to look out and avoid the collision. That is all I was trying to say, sorry if it wasn’t clear.
Steve,
first of all thanks for reporting this incident here. It makes quite interesting reading and it is never bad for us all to read such things and learn from them.
Steve6443 wrote:
On base, I start receiving warnings from my Zaon MRX – intruder 2NM away, 700 feet lower (I’m at 1200 feet with a field elevation of 200 feet), trend no change. I turn onto final at around 1000 feet and the alerts are getting more pronounced – 400 feet lower, climbing, less than 0.5NM away. I call final, receive the wind info from the field, now the MRX is showing traffic 300 feet lower, climbing, 0.3NM.
Now if I may summarize this:
You got the first warning when the intruder was 2NM and – 700 ft.
Then you got alerts saying the intruder was 0.5 NM and -400 ft.
Finally you get alerts showing -300 ft and 0.3 NM.
So it was quite obvious that this target which you did not see until after that -300ft / 0.3 NM warning was closing rapidly into your flight path.
The question which comes up in my mind is, if the TIS gives such warnings, what would my reaction be? Or rather, what should it be?
The one thing these traffic information systems usually do get right is the altitude information of the intruder. A TCAS would in such a case most probably offer a resolution advisory to climb, which makes perfect sense if an airplane is approaching your flightpath from below. A TIS does not do that, so we need to do our own resolution.
My gut feeling, sitting in my comfy chair and thinking about it, would be to climb the heck away from that target as soon as it becomes clear that he is closing from below and at the same time coming closer horizontally. Even if we don’t trust the information of the TIS, that is what we have it for?
So looking at your profile again, your TIS gave a closure from -700 ft to -300 ft and a horizontal closure to 0.3 NM. By the time you actually saw him, you were in actual danger of collision.
As I said before, I am thankful for this example. I’ve had similar experiences where I had traffic alerts triggered by Mode C (or Non-ADSB) altitude indicators, where no azimuth is given in Power Flarm but only a range ring. My reaction usually was to climb/descend away from them in order to maintain vertical separation if ever possible. If I have an azimuth as well (ADSB or FLARM Targets) I look out and if negative contact will again try to primarily stay separated vertically. TCAS actually only does vertical avoidance, no left/right resolutions ever. So again, that would suggest vertical resolution is the primary target.
My two cents and in no way meant to debrief your particular reaction but rather a “what if” for myself if faced with the same situation.
As to the other pilot: this kind of attitude is unacceptable and needs urgent reconsideration. We’ve had some rather similar and very stupid incidents around my homebase where people have violated airspace massively due to simple and balant ignorance of all rules. People like that need to be caught and either retrained or if not possible taken out of circulation. Therefore I’d have to say it was the absolutely right thing to do by the radio operator to file a report.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
We’ve had some rather similar and very stupid incidents around my homebase where people have violated airspace massively due to simple and balant ignorance of all rules.
I seem to have about one similar experience every year, generally with people making nonstandard circuit/pattern entries. I fly in much more populated airspace than anywhere in Europe. My conclusion based on that experience is that you can’t and won’t fix stupid and neither will anybody else.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
My gut feeling, sitting in my comfy chair and thinking about it, would be to climb the heck away from that target as soon as it becomes clear that he is closing from below and at the same time coming closer horizontally.
I agree. The best thing to do is get out of the way as soon as there’s a potential issue, start again with the threat gone, then forget about it. They won’t hit you if you’re no longer anywhere near. I’ve also used that mentality in riding street motorcycles for 35 years and have yet to sustain any injury. Thinking of everybody else as randomly moving, out of control objects (and not worrying about why) works pretty well for me.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
My gut feeling, sitting in my comfy chair and thinking about it, would be to climb the heck away from that target as soon as it becomes clear that he is closing from below and at the same time coming closer horizontally. Even if we don’t trust the information of the TIS, that is what we have it for?
And that is the crux of the problem. Too often I’ve approached my home field to find an aircraft sitting on the field with it’s transponder on, sending duff altitude info, that I’d practically written off the fact that it could be an actual intruder, especially as between 2NM and 0.5NM there was no change in trend of the altitude. That lulled me into a false sense of confusion that indeed I was seeing exactly the same. The boy that cried Wolf syndrome, I think.
Once I spotted the motor glider, with hindsight, maybe I should have slammed the throttle to the firewall and got the heck out of Dodge but I was more concerned with two things, the first being, having pushed the throttle full forward, I would need to raise the nose to initiate the climb and would no longer have the intruder in sight; the second point was the time it would have taken to transit from a 600fpm descent, arrest the descent and convert it to a climb with a reasonable rate of ascent, not knowing how fast he was climbing, or indeed his cruising speed, especially with him no longer in my field of view – all I knew was that he was, at that moment, overtaking me so by slowing down, it was the easiest way to increase the separation.
TCAS does give you the azimuth as well as relative altitude. My TAS605 does that.
In commercial contexts the pilot is not allowed to act other than to climb or descend, but sometimes they do… I have seen radar videos where somebody flew into a holding stack and the jets scattered in all directions laterally.
If i get a traffic advisory I damn well act on it, usually by climbing as fast as possible and, if the azimuth is clear, laterally also. I have had a number of these near Shoreham. The worst one was at Zell am See where the other guy also climbed at +1000fpm before finally giving up… stupid noise abatement routes.
Most of these are not visual. Sometimes later on. Recently I got one and only ever saw his shadow on the grass below.
Peter wrote:
In commercial contexts the pilot is not allowed to act other than to climb or descend,…
This should be independent of the context commercial/private otherwise the system can’t work. The problem is that the private sector has some collision alerting systems which are not ACAS (“TCAS” is a trademark registered to Honeywell…) compatible, therefore possibly issuing commands which contradict those of the ACAS units.
Real ACAS generates two kinds of alerts: TA or traffic advisory, which is nothing but an information that traffic might become a problem soon (the electronic voice shouts “TRAFFIC TRAFFIC”). Pilots are not supposed to react to these alerts other than maintaining an external lookout and trying to identify the traffic which caused the alert. Especially at night, between layers of clouds, during banked turns or in climbs and descents it is almost impossible to predict whether or not there will be a risk of collision, therefore nothing must be done.
The second type is RA or resolution alert. This results in commands being issued to the pilot (eg. “CLIMB CLIMB” or “LEVEL OFF LEVEL OFF”) which must be followed within five seconds. No matter what the situation looks like outside the window or what the ATC controller is saying (the collision at Überlingen was the result of one aircraft following the controller and the other the TCAS commands). There are only RAs in the vertical plane.
Silvaire wrote:
I agree. The best thing to do is get out of the way as soon as there’s a potential issue, start again with the threat gone, then forget about it. They won’t hit you if you’re no longer anywhere near
My thinking as well. Besides, this looks like a “procedural” error, let the ATC handle it any way they chose – if they want to. Also, glider pilots (I guess he was glider pilot flying a TMG), are used to flying close – much closer and in larger numbers than GA pilots. There were no danger here at all as I see it, even if he flew a bit hairy.
