Once, long long ago, when I was a low time private pilot in the UK, returning from a successful trip from the south coast, feeling pretty good, keeping my navigation log up to date, making sure I was avoiding restricted areas,

Whoaa! What was that!

A purple coloured aircraft, twin engined, diving and turning to my left, a near-miss (or near hit as I prefer to call them, after all we did miss). Didn’t see him, until too late, clearly head on slightly lower and much faster than me. Maybe 200 ft laterally and 50ft below. Too close for me. What did I do wrong? Head in the cockpit too long? No TCAS in my little Cessna 152?

I spent a lot of time looking into what could and should be done after that. Let’s start with the obvious:

1) Keep your lookout going. Even in the circuit, I know it’s a busy time but some people fly right through circuits oblivious of their existence. Day-time VFR lookout is simple: small segments of the sky say 10 degrees, concentrate on that sector (you’re looking for any objects that tickles your eye-balls), then move on to the next 10 degrees. As one of my first instructors said to me

“The plane that kills you comes from the side”. He was a bit inscrutable, but I think he meant make sure your scan covers from 8 O’clock all the way to 4 O’clock, not just ahead and 30 degrees to the side.

2) Don’t got heads-in. Every task in the cockpit can be broken down into small chunks giving you the opportunity to look out again. Even dialing frequency numbers can be broken down

One- Look – One – Look – Nine – Decimal Nine – Look. You get the idea.

3) CRM is crucial. If you have an instructor on board, make sure they are looking as well, they probably are anyway. If you have a passenger on board, pay them to spot small aircraft at your level. Playing games on the Nintendo DS while you fly is a waste of two good Mark 1 eyeballs. Pay them one pound for every aircraft they see.

4) Get a traffic service, ATC load dependent of course, but sometimes a big distraction in crowded areas:

“Traffic 2 O’clock , three miles, no height”, usually means theres an airbus 10,000 feet above you, still it’s better than not having the service.

5) Position reporting by you is especially important at lightly controlled airfields, such as in the USA where CTAF frequencies are for exactly this purpose.

“Lakeland traffic, Cessna 3421 Zulu, down-wind for runway 21, Lakeland traffic”.

This tactic may not be much use if someone is just bombing through a zone, because they are probably not even on the right frequency.

6) Get TCAS. There are some very good cheap models out there, that warn you of conflicts. I like the G1000 warning system, where you can overlay the traffic on your moving map. This is a great system. I once ‘watched’ a conflicting aircraft fly below me and across. I knew exactly where it was (the TCAS told me) but I never once saw it. These systems are great.

7) Get an Instrument rating. This one obviously is a little harder to achieve, but the idea once you have an IFR flight plan someone else is also responsible for keeping legally mandated minimum distances from you to the next plane.

Don’t fly at the same height as everybody else. Choose an odd altitude, Why fly at 2,000′ when you can fly at 2,150′ feet? If you look at the density of traffic at different altitudes in a VFR environment, you see a huge number of aircraft at 2,000′ . Look slightly higher, the density of traffic is much lower. Again this doesn’t help with circuit blasting.

9) Finally, I would recommend you read the Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) or look at their website. It details events that were near hits and describes in detail what everybody did, when they did it. If you understand these events you can get into the mind set to avoid these events.  

Finally I would say collision avoidance is a major task of the VFR pilot, especially single pilot operation. As a low time pilot you may not have the capacity to keep your look out going all the time, but as you build up more experience more time can be allocated to lookout. As my instrument instructor said:

“If your’e doing nothing on a single-pilot operation flight, you should feel guilty, look out, check something, what possible conflicts could there be”.

None of the above are foolproof of course, but lowering your chances of that scary moment happening are what it’s all about.

Why you might ask with the poor behaviour do I love my ADF? Simple. I mean because it’s simple to understand, it’s simple to use (maybe not simple to use well), but simple nonetheless. It can be explained so easily. “A man stands in a field with a light bulb, and you go towards the light bulb”.  Now the light bulb is an NDB and you can ‘see’ it with you ADF. Just follow the needle. Introduce wind correction later and heads and tails of the needle for tracking away and little dogs raising their tails etc. But the essense of it is to follow the yellow arrow. Of course GPS’s have made thing even simpler now, but checking the RAIM on G1000 requires some time and effort to find in the menus (OK only a small gripe). The only thing you have to do for an ADF is to have power, and listen to the identifier continuously.

Little know facts about NDBs. “W” indicates that no voice transmissions are made on the beacon, and remember that if you can hear the local radio station instead of the identifier you’d better use something else. The next time you need to practise some instrument flying, ask you instructor where you could try some tracking TO and FROM an NDB with wind correction. You’ll thank me for it.

“Keep your lookout going”

I had gone too much heads-in the cockpit. A better procedure is set a letter, back to the lookout. Set a letter back to the lookout. He was of course right. The more complicated the GPS the more you can get sucked in. This is especially true with something like the G1000 but simpler GPS and moving map units will have the same effect. They are not computer games that you can get engrossed in! Make the smallest sensible unit of adjustment and keep your lookout going.

Now that Summer is truly upon us we need to keep a keen eye out for all those other pilots that have been waiting for the good weather. Don’t be one of those keeping your head in the cockpit!

G1000 Traffic Display

With the G1000 system becoming ever more capable and with it being fitted to more and more aircraft, it’s probably time that you got the glass cockpit conversion! I’ve mentioned the Synthetic Vision system in a previous month (http://www.flyingfamilies.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=320&Itemid=1). This is the display you can overlay on the PFD, but there is a wealth of information that can be displayed on the MFD too. One of these systems (if fitted) is the TIS (Traffic Information System). It is shown as one or two rings (depending on your range setting) on which are displayed detected traffic. To select the “Map – TRAFFIC MAP” page,  rotate the large FMS knob to the MAP choice. Then rotate in the smaller FMS button tot he “MAP – TRAFFC MAP” page.
If the unit is active the soft buttons on the screen will show a STANDBY | OPERATE choice, with OPERATE selected.
Your own aircraft is shown in the middle. If traffic is detected but out of range then a half yellow circle represents the traffic.

A solid yellow circle represents conflicting traffic in range of the system. A Solid white diamond represents traffic which is not in conflict in range of the system. A solid white diamond is “Proximate traffic”. I think this means not conflicting but it could conflict based on it’s current movements. A hollow white diamond is traffic in range but appears to be not in conflict.

Height trends are shown besides the symbols. An arrow pointing up if the aircraft is ascending at a greater than 500 ft/min rate and a downard pointing arrow if the aircract is descending at more than 500 ft/min.

Numbers above or below the symbol tell you abou the current height above or below your own aircraft. The number is shown below for aircraft below and above for aircraft above.

The range of the system can be set to 2nm, 6nm or 12nm, by adjusting the RANGE button. Voice alerts are generated whenever a new aircraft is detected and the system can even be configured to have a male or female voice.You can set the voice from the “AUX- SYSTEM SETUP” page under the “AUDIO ALERT” section.