January 2005
If you have a midair collision it isn’t going to happen like it does in the movies. It won’t be a head-on, high-speed thing like those dogfight passes in “Top Gun.” It won’t be a Beechcraft Baron hovering in your windshield just before you smack into it, again head-on like in that old “Airport” movie.
According to a recent study by the AOPA Safety Foundation, chances are you’ll overtake or be overtaken in a midair collision—not smacked in the face by an oncoming airplane in a head-on mishap. Eighty-two percent of midair collisions happen when a faster aircraft overtakes and rear-ends a slower one. That makes those rear windows in your Cessna a nice thing to include in your scan and might be a good reason for Piper owners to wish they had a rearview mirror.
The fact that you are more apt to be run over than run into takes away all the thunder of most discussions about midairs; you know, those great head-on charts that tell you how many seconds you have to live if you are face-to-face with a military fighter.
How Many, How Often and Where?
Midairs don’t happen as often as you might think in the General Aviation world, but they do happen.
A study done by the AOPA using 2002 statistics indicated that nine total midair collisions happened in this country and five of them were fatal. Based on the fact that General Aviation aircraft flew a total of 25.5 million hours that year, five fatalities isn’t a bad number unless you are one of them. Compared to the automobile world where cars seem to smash into each other with abandon, nine midairs isn’t even statistically relevant.
In other words, you are probably more likely to buy the farm during what you think of as a normal landing than because you had a fender bender with an airplane in front of you on final.
Again, according to AOPA figures, in 2002, 57 accidents happened during landing and five of those were fatal. For a little more perspective on the midair figures keep in mind that in 2002 there were 1,472 General Aviation accidents with 312 fatalities.
The most likely place for that unwanted “close encounter of the thud kind” is where you would expect it to happen: near an airport and near a lot of other airplanes. Eighty percent of midair mishaps happen within 10 miles of an airport and 78 percent happen in the traffic pattern at non-towered airports. Over half of the accidents happen below 500 feet AGL.
Midairs are not only most likely to happen within ten miles of your “home drome.” They are also most probable during peak flight training times—day VFR between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.
See and Avoid
Unless you have a fully functional TCAS (traffic collision and avoidance system) onboard you are going to have to rely on your eyeballs to keep you from getting an unwanted aluminum enema. The problem with your peepers is that they have limitations.
We humans were designed and built as hunter-gatherers, not bumblebees or houseflies, so our eyes were intended to focus very well on one thing at a time with a limited range. The retina of your eye contains rods and cones. Cones detect color, details, and distant objects. Rods don’t detect color but their claim to fame is they can detect objects in motion, out of the corner of the eye (peripheral vision).
The fovea is a small bundle of cones in your retina located at the back of your eye directly opposite your lens. It contains cones only and is the area of sharpest vision in your eye. In other words, humans were designed to hunt and survive and in order to do that they needed to be able not only to detect a fast-moving rabbit in order to get their supper, they needed to detect a fast-moving tiger in order to avoid being dinner.
The good news is that our eyes are very good at picking out movement, like the movement of another aircraft. The bad news comes in two forms. First, your normal field of vision is only about 10 percent of the total picture. Second, if you are about to collide with another airplane it will be unmoving, in the same spot of your windshield, right up to impact.
The story on peripheral vision isn’t much more encouraging. Outside of your 10-degree cone of vision, you can only see about one-tenth of what you can detect with your fovea. Meaning that an airplane 10,000 feet away that you would see with your fovea won’t appear in your peripheral vision until it is 1,000 feet away.
All of this hoo-ha about your eyes is based on your flying though perfectly clear weather with some available light, either daylight or moonlight. It gets really dicey in the real world because we all know that absolutely clear well-lit days are few and far between and besides, as we already discovered, those days are when it is most likely you’ll have a midair boo-boo.
Fog, dust, clouds, darkness, haze, rain, snow, sun glare and dirty windshields will all gang up to reduce your vision and because of this also reduce your chances to avoid hitting the other guy.
You can keep your windshield clean and hopefully eliminate that age-old question, is that a bug or a Beechcraft? You can’t control the weather but you can certainly control what weather you’ll choose to go flying in. The risk of low visibility not only includes the possibility that you might have trouble maintaining VFR, it also cuts down on your safety from midair collisions.
Scud running adds more of a risk because if you are below a low cloud deck following the interstate highway to home (because they have those great road signs) it is likely that another pilot is following the same road home in the opposite direction.
Keep Your Head on a Swivel
In today’s high-tech cockpits you might find yourself “heads down” more often than is safe. Programming that GPS unit is great but if you miss that airplane in front of you because you are trying to plot a course to the doo-doo intersection, you are going to be in trouble. In the airline world, we always make sure that one crewmember is looking outside while the other one is programming the gee-whiz stuff inside.
Based on the facts we covered about your eyeballs, you’ll understand why the most successful fighter pilots “kept their heads on a swivel” or kept them moving. You should do the same. We could spend days and hundreds of pages discussing techniques that the geezers at the FAA recommend, but I think you’ll understand that the important part is to keep your head moving at a regular basis all around your “domain.”
You should do this even in solid IFR conditions. Just how far can you see when you think you are encased in cloud? A lot further than you think… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the clouds—say, in holding—and seen another aircraft miles away. In clouds and haze, you have no frame of reference like the ground but you can still see quite a bit more than you think.
The old eyeballs don’t need much maintenance, but you might want to avoid smoking around them. Also, a good pair of polarized sunglasses is a must for those sunny days.
Leave a Light On for Me…
It should go without saying that if you have strobes and or a rotating beacon they should be on at all times day and night. I turn the rotating beacon on just before push-back on the airliners I fly and just before engine start on General Aviation aircraft. It gives the people on the ramp a heads-up that something is about to happen.
The only time your strobes or rotating beacon might be off in flight is if you are in a cloud and they are making you disoriented. I sometimes turn the strobes off when on approach on a low viz night just to cut down on my confusion. Other than that, your lights are your best friends when it comes to avoiding a midair.
Operation Lights On is an FAA-sponsored program based on a common-sense idea. Your landing lights should be on at all times from just before takeoff until you clear the runway after landing, day or night. The fuzz suggests that you keep those landing lights on during the rest of the flight when you are operating below 10,000 feet. The lights give you a little edge in the “see and be seen” war.
I suggest that you do what we airline jocks do. We keep our landing lights on when we are below 18,000 feet. If you are above 18,000 you are in positive control airspace and ATC is in charge of keeping the metal separated. Below the flight levels there is always a mix of separated and non-separated airplanes, so your odds are better if the other pilot can see you.
Clear that Area
Clearing turns aren’t a maneuver you just did to impress your CFI and pilot examiner. They are a survival technique. When was the last time you did a 360-degree taxi turn on the ground at the end of the runway just before takeoff to make sure the pattern (especially the final) was clear?
Please, Don’t Hit Me
Nothing can ruin a great day of flying like getting hit by another aircraft. Chances are good that this will never happen to you but the best defense is to keep your head moving, your brain functioning, and your aircraft brightly visible to the rest of the world.
Kevin Garrison’s aviation career began at age 15 as a lineboy in Lakeland, Fla. He came up through General Aviation and is currently a senior 767 captain. When not frightening passengers, Kevin plays tennis and lives on a horse farm in Kentucky, where he writes unsold humor projects and believes professional wrestling is real and all else is bogus.
