Paul_Sengupta wrote:
PB wrote:mid-air collisions in GA present a very low, indeed vanishingly small risk
Depends how you measure it. We seem to be averaging one a year, with almost a definition of two aircraft involved (there is the possibility, if small, of more than two colliding). There are around 14 or so aircraft involved in fatal crashes per year in the UK, so that's about 1 in 7 of the aircraft involved in fatal accidents. Very rough figures of course.
Quite. If it was not a direct head on collision for both aircraft, then if just one of them was a few seconds earlier or later the collision would not have happened. How many thousands of flight hours are flown by GA every year in the UK? So chance of a collision occurs for 1 second in how many millions of seconds of GA flying time? Better chance of winning the big prize on the lottery?
Most people consider motorcycling quite dangerous with a high chance of collision with another vehicle even for those that ride sensibly (additional rider training has been proven to mitigate some of that risk). The average rider does 3000 miles per year. If they are lucky enough to do an average of 40mph, that is 75 hours experience per year, perhaps mostly at the weekend when the weather is nice. If they do a lot less miles per year, the insurance premium goes up due to higher risk (rusty skills and road craft?). If they do a lot more miles per year, the insurance premium goes up due to the longer exposure to the risks.
Similarly, high houred GA pilots have had a longer exposure to a variety of aviation risks whilst building up a lot of aviation experience. The vast majority will have a long and happy life without colliding with anything.
A police road crash investigator once told me that if you consider all the events in peoples lives that put two drivers at the same place and time by chance, if either of them got out of bed a second earlier or later on that day the incident would never have occurred! Some could apply that reasoning to aviation collisions, and some will of course disagree. There is an element of chance of something untoward happening in everything we do.
The first airborne near miss I can remember was on my navigation flight test - ended up head to head with a glider in the Alton area and the examiner said "I have control...". We missed that one, although that examiner did go on to have a collision with a glider some years later and everyone survived (plane landed safely with a bit of outer wing damage, and glider pilot used a parachute).
As an AAIB man recently said on TV, an aircraft mid-air collision is very, very rare.
The cheapest thing GA can do to reduce that risk even further is to consider collision risk during route selection, and pick a less obvious route, A few minutes extra flight time wont break the bank.
Perhaps keep that magenta line feature on the left side of the aircraft. Costs nothing.
(Dons tin hat!)