Phil, since you had the six on your display, you had his tail #? If so, is it worth a conversation with him or water under the bridge? Just like to know how others would handle a situation like this.

Barnstormer wrote:

mtv wrote:Phil, regarding the first target you noted, bear in mind that the ADS-B reg requires "out" but not "in", so it's entirely possible that plane was equipped with the minimum equipment.

Or the pilot was texting his buddies about how cool his new airplane is......

MTV

I figure he was texting. Beautiful clear day, I have tail and wing strobes that are like solar flares even in bright sunshine so there is no way his eyes were out of the cockpit.

The plane at Santa Fe didn't concern me as I could see it, but I was amazed that two aircraft were inside its airspace and hadn't communicated with the tower. Guess I shouldn't be surprised at anything should I.


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Closest I've ever come to midair was a 180 crossing in front from my 5 0' Clock. We were less than a mile from the tower, in Delta airspace. I called him out to the tower, and they couldn't see him (they were looking into the sun) and they couldn't see him on their radar....he was flying tangential to the radar. He wasn't talking to ATC. He then exited the Delta airspace, called tower for landing clearance.

I went and talked to him. He was giving an aerial tour to friends.....i.e.: distracted. Nice guy, but wasn't actually flying an airplane that day.

I actually asked ATC to look at the radar tape, because I couldn't believe he didn't show up....he didn't. No transponder.

All the technology in the world is no guarantee.

MTV

I have a hard time believing radar can't pick up a non transponder target?

I could have snapped a screen shot, and then looked up his record, maybe found a phone number, but not guarantee the info would even be correct, after all I was following that Beechcraft two days before for a couple hundred miles and it turned out to be a helicopter. And believe it, you can be inside a tower's airspace and not show up on their radar screen without a transponder - that happened to me in ANC earlier this year.


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Radar must be weird sometimes. A goose they can see, even if not ADS equipped.

DeltaRomeo wrote:I have a hard time believing radar can't pick up a non transponder target?

The key term is "flying tangential to the antenna". He was traveling in the same direction of antenna sweep, and on a curved path, thus maintaining roughly same distance from the antenna. These radars are Doppler radars, so they automatically suppress any target that shows a slow relative motion. For example, the radar there in FAI, if this feature is turned off, will show cars on the Steele Highway. Sensitivity is also adjusted to reduce clutter.

Depending on how the radar is adjusted, primary targets may be very difficult to observe.

MTV

mtv wrote:Depending on how the radar is adjusted, primary targets may be very difficult to observe.

Great, another thing to keep me up thinking about...

(thanks for the info...)

Just some random comments, from some of what's been said here:

Yeah, I was thinking in terms of being more than 1200' AGL, getting above Class G. With the proliferation of towers of various kinds, I don't do much flying below 1200' these days. There are an amazing number of up to 2000' AGL towers throughout the US, and although they're all supposed to be lit, they're still hard to see if there's the slightest haze. And of course, there are still a bunch of unlit, unmarked towers that extend to 200', in spite of many states passing laws over the last few years mandating lighting and marking of anything over 50' tall.

Exception: One year my OSH trip included a buddy who was a C130 navigator with the Wyoming Air Guard--probably the sharpest pilotage navigator I've ever flown with, with many thousands of hours of low level navigation experience. When we left OSH, it was barely VFR, with thicker stuff above, and we couldn't get an IFR clearance until after Madison. He suggested that we keep it low, and with sectional in hand, he'd keep us from running into towers and dodging airport areas. So I leveled off initially at 1800' MSL,1000' AGL. I can't quite fly as accurately as he could navigate, but I remember one of his navigation calls: "There are a series of towers ahead. Turn left 4 degrees."

Mostly I prefer flying long distances at altitude, especially in the summer--cooler, smoother, and in the mid-levels around 8-10,000', not much traffic, as GA traffic is often lower and of course the jet/turbine traffic is higher. Eastbound, there's usually a stronger tailwind at altitude.

On how usable ADS-B is in the mountains, I've had ADS-B In for 3 1/2 years; I've only had ADS-B Out for about 11 months, and much of that time my airplane was down due to waiting for the new exhaust system to be built, and then I lost several months when the FAA pulled my medical until I got it back. So I can't talk much about TIS-B traffic in the mountains, but I can talk about FIS-B weather. Keeping in mind that the ADS-B towers are pretty prolific in the Colorado Rockies, while I can't get ADS-B weather on the ground, I can get it at relatively low AGL altitudes. Example: coming out of Marble a couple of years ago, I started picking up weather about halfway between Redstone and Carbondale while still in the canyon, not yet to 10,000' MSL. I think that's about 2500' AGL or thereabouts. From that point all the way home, I had good weather depiction. I get pretty good FIS-B weather at pattern altitude at both KGXY and KFNL, the two airports I most frequently use.

On some errant pilot not looking outside to see a brightly lit-up airplane, I think that's a fundamental problem with the combination of TAA and fancy autopilots. It's too easy to program a sophisticated autopilot to do its thing, climb up to and maintain some pre-selected altitude, while the pilot pays attention to something else, like his lunch or his passengers or some actual pilot-related chore, other than looking out the windshield for traffic. To some extent, we're all guilty of not looking as hard as we should at times. Granted that mid-airs are rare, they do happen, especially near airports and nav sites, wherever airplanes tend toward funneling into the same space. We like to think that our airplanes fly slow enough that it's not our problem, but there is an abundance of much faster traffic out there, so that closing speeds are still amazingly fast at times. Have you ever thought about how little time there is to react when closing speeds are around 400 knots (light GA at 125 knots, biz jet at 275 knots)? An airplane that is 5 nm away (barely visible) will be upon you in only 45 seconds! Even two light GA airplanes closing at hypothetical speeds of 125 knots each only have 72 seconds to avert a collision.

We can mitigate the danger somewhat by maintaining our own vigilance, by using flight following, by turning on our lights, by flying at correct hemispheric rule altitudes, by flying a little off airway centerlines, and (horror of horrors) making sure our transponders and ADS-B Out equipment are working correctly, but nothing we can do will totally eliminate the possibility.

I admit to having some comfort with the traffic reporting I now receive, although I don't yet have much experience with it. My new KT74 transponder is ES, so I get 1090 traffic there which appears on the 430W screen, and my Stratus 2 pulls in the ADS-B In traffic on both 1090 and 978 and displays it on my iPad Mini. My iPad Mini also shows conflict warning windows, and I get verbal conflict warnings through my headset from both sources. That's about as close as I can get to bubble-wrapping my airplane, I think.

On radar not seeing primary targets, many, MANY years ago I toured the ARTCC at Longmont. I don't pretend to know much about radar, but I noticed that if the controllers had the screens dimmed so that transponder equipped airplane targets weren't excessively bright, which was pretty necessary to reduce glare in that dark windowless room, primary targets (airplanes without transponders) were barely visible at best and disappeared at times. This was back in the early days when people were still carping about installing transponders, so there were a whole lot more transponder-less aircraft back then. I suspect the equipment is better now, so that they might not have to adjust the intensity quite so much, but it's certainly not something to count on.

Cary

Cary wrote:

.
... in spite of many states passing laws over the last few years mandating lighting and marking of anything over 50' tall.

I used to be, sort of still am I suppose, a ham radio operator. 80 to 100+ foot towers are not that uncommon. Some ham towers are in fact crank up or tilt up affairs, and indeed can easily go up >50 - 75 feet. Sometimes they are there, and sometimes they are not.

I am not sure whether all the hams got the memo on illuminating their tall towers holding huge beam antennas. In fact, I don't even know if such regulations apply to amateur radio operations, except maybe on a voluntary basis. If anyone knows, please chime in.