Don’t let your glass panel kill either of us.

I don’t know if he would have eventually seen me when he got closer but I am quite sure that I would not have seen him coming at me from behind as he did. I consider the purchase price of the TCAS money very well spent. I sometimes wonder if we wouldn’t be well advised to install rear-view mirrors like we have on our cars.

Although midair’s are a “low rate” accident I sure like the peace of mind in having a second set of eyes when my students are under the hood.

I think my real awakening when first flying with in-cockpit traffic was how much I DIDN’T see. Trying to find a small aircraft at a distance of more than 2 miles is no easy task, particularly if they are in the clutter just below the horizon. I use flight following on just about every flight (or monitor local frequencies when just punching a hole in the sky), and have found that several times, I wasn’t made aware of traffic on a conflicting course. It’s not ATC’s fault, they’re helping me on a workload-permitting basis, but I notice on my flights with traffic displays I’m altering course long before I’m within see-and-avoid range if it appears there could be a conflict ahead. It also helps me find that traffic more than 2 miles out that I would have never seen with a traditional scan.

Nothing will alleviate the PIC’s responsibility to see-and-avoid. But in-cockpit traffic, like in-cockpit weather, is an excellent aid to situational awareness.

Have fun, but fly safe!

I’ve forwarded your request on to the AOPA Gov’t Affairs for their response on the status of ADS-B. It’s been pointed out that the equipment is a supplement when visual – not a guarantee.

A little paranoia when flying is never a bad thing. Thanks for all the comments!

As you pointed out, the most common danger area is the pattern. But not all pilots pay attention to what is going on there, where other aircraft are or are likely to be. They just motor on, as if there are no other aircraft nearby. Here are a couple of examples:

Too often, I find myself arguing with pilots over whether to use a checklist in the pattern—but doing so means flying blind for at least several seconds at a time. At normal pattern speeds for trainers, during a 5 second lapse from looking, the aircraft travels well more than the length of a football field. My argument: If you need a pre-landing checklist, look at it well before you get into the pattern.

A couple of years ago, I had a near mid-air in the pattern at GXY. It was a beautiful busy Saturday morning, with several aircraft in the pattern using 09, with a TPA of 800′ AGL. A local Skylane was shooting practice IFR approaches and broke off his ILS to 34 at 800′ AGL–and shot right through the downwind for 9 so close in front of me that I could see the rivets on the airplane.

We need to do more to be sure we are seen by others, in hopes that they will be looking. When I bought my airplane 8 years ago, it had the bare minimum lighting for night flight: position lights, landing/taxi lights, and a rotating beacon. Soon after purchase, I had wingtip strobes installed, then changed out the landing/taxi lights with HID lights and then added a Pulselite circuit to flash them. During the annual it is undergoing right now, a strobe light is being substituted for the rotating beacon. I run the strobes and beacon all of the time, and I turn on the pulsing landing/taxi lights well before I get into the pattern. Yet every time I’m at the airport, I see aircraft in the pattern with no lights on at all, including no beacon.

The most sophisticated traffic avoidance gear won’t mean a thing, if it’s not used or if it’s used improperly at inappropriate times. Even when every single aircraft is fully equipped with all of such bells and whistles, it will never substitute for old-fashioned awareness—and that means not only looking outside, but recognizing that the big sky isn’t all that big at times.