Sat Jun 12, 2021 5:54 pm
#1852530
Cub wrote:TopCat wrote:My worst ever was much closer than 5s.
It was... look up, see plane, enormous, absolutely head to head, roll right and pull, he flashed past underneath my wings. The whole thing over in 3s or less.
I didn't stop shaking for many minutes. That was about 25 years ago. Nothing remotely as close as that since. As far as I know...
Can you point us at the Airprox report for that event. I am assuming at Cat A?
I'm absolutely certain it was Cat A. If I'd been a second later fiddling about with whatever I was fiddling about with, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be here to annoy everyone. The wings were just lines (so no vertical separation more than inches); the bit in the middle was just the tiny front cross section, no fuselage at all.
He didn't change course at all in that second I was reacting.
I didn't file it. It was very early in my flying career; it was just two pilots in the open FIR (somewhere between OCK and BIG) in poor vis. There it was, and then it was gone. It was a single, low wing, other than that I have no idea what it was. I looked round in the turn, couldn't even find him again.
I would file it now, even though it would be just a useless data point. I reckon they'd only class it as B, maximum, as see and avoid did in fact work - just. And they explicitly ignore any "but if I hadn't..." in their assessment. Which seems utterly rubbish to me, and renders the whole reporting system virtually pointless.
Ever since then, however, I get an exponentially-increasing buildup of stress whenever I'm head down for more than a couple of seconds.