A4 Pacific wrote:Clearly you didn’t see the traffic you thought conflicted with you. Since you don’t know whether or not the other aircraft was fitted with EC that yours failed to detect, I presume you are equally unaware whether that aircraft had you in sight and was manouvering accordingly? You certainly don’t mention altering your own trajectory in response?
I'm fairly sure the other aircraft had no EC. I pick up plenty of traffic in from all directions with little masking (I checked, having written the inverse analysis of what the PilotAware Vector thing does to study my reception capability, rather than my transmission capability). If the aircraft did have EC, I would have expected to see it at least some point round the circuit or after landing, but there was nothing.
Since I believe the aircraft was departing, it seems unlikely to me that it would have spotted me joining from overhead.
A4 Pacific wrote:Playing Devil’s advocate for a moment. Since the FISO seems to have been the significant input here. Wouldn’t it be more logical to mandate FISOs whenever any circuit is active at any airstrip? Rather than EC?
I'm grateful for the FISOs input, but at that point (both established on crosswind at the same level flying parallel) the collision risk was small and doesn't concern me. My concern is what happened
before that point - that our paths could have crossed had the situation and timing been slightly different such that the other aircraft had climbed into me.
This is what I meant by "inadvertently rolling the dice". Theoretically, "see and avoid" would have caused me to spot the other aircraft visually and maintain separation visually, thus reducing the risk of MAC to virtually zero. Instead, it seems to me that without realising it I played the "big sky" odds - except the sky isn't so big in and about the area where our paths are
supposed to converge. It's debatable what the odds actually were. But if EC worked reliably and both aircraft were fitted and alerting, then I wouldn't have to play the odds at all in this way and there would be no debate on what the odds would have been because (in this scenario) it would have been zero.