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By Anon
Anonymous poster
#733868
I know this one seems to come up a lot but I wanted to share the following -

I was passenger on a VFR filght returning to base (I had flown out that morning) and we were routing between a VRP and a town about 20 nm away. These are connected by a large river. We were talking to a local radar unit and reported at the VRP as requested. Shortly after, another aircraft called on freq reporting at said town routing to said VRP at a similar altitude to us. Myself and the pilot both comented that we need to keep a good lookout for that one as he was reciprical to us. We continued to track to the town keeping the river on our left and keeping our eyes peeled. We spotted a Robin prob 500 - 600 ft below us and slightly ahead similar heading, a high wing out to our right some distance away and flying in the oposite direction and then a microlight slightly above us 10 o'clock, ~ 1 nm also oposite diection. The microlight had got my attention, but as I looked back I saw the reciprical trafic stright ahead and not too far away. We turned right, and the trafic passed over us ~ 200 ft higher and to our left.

In mulling this over when I got home several things struck me. It just brought i home how quickly aircraft close on each other head on. From spotting the traffic there wasn't much time to react (and neither of us were in fast types). Its easy when its busy with trafic to get too hung up on traffic which you can see so you stop looking for other possible conflicts. We were sensible to choose intermediate altitudes to fly at, we were at 2300 ft and I guess the other aircraft was at 2500 ft.
I don't think there was a high risk of anything nasty as we saw and avoided, but the other aircraft made no move to avoid so I have no idea if they saw us. If we had been 200 ft higher it may have been more interesting....
#734697
The reciprocal traffic would have been less likely to see you, because it was higher - you'd have disappeared under their cowling some distance away.

Well seen-and-avoided, though!

Good point about getting hung up on looking at already-spotted traffic - that's caught me out before. It's really difficult when there's so much traffic around, though: an already-spotted plane can easily change course to come into conflict (thereby possibly making itself harder to re-spot), and this legitimate worry is always going to reduce the effectiveness of the lookout for other traffic.