G'day BIK, I've never been a big one for responding to individual lines as I tend to take a bigger picture approach (a bit like your 'Big Sky Theory'!
).
You may not be an advocate of see and avoid but your advocation of 'Big Sky Theory' as the primary means of seperation is bordering on myopic. Even on random tracks a couple of jumbo's came uncomfortably close on trips across the Pacific. There is HEAPS of sky between SYD and LAX (or AKL and LAX) and yet these guys ended up closer than they should have been. I'm sorry but I don't want to be the driver that disproves your big sky theory because it will get disproved.
You originally advocated TCAS as helping you to 'build the picture' on what is going on around you. I'm telling you that it doesn't help you 'build a picture', it helps you to 'react' to an error of someone being in your bit of airspace very soon. I've been using it now for about eight years and as a SA tool it's use isn't as good as what you have been saying on this forum that it will be. Yes, it's handy, but it certainly isn't perfect and isn't capable of building the picture to the stage where I'd take 'free flight', BST, and then using it as a fall back to that! An RA is NOT an everyday manouevre and shouldn't become one. That shouldn't be the 'default' solution for when your BST goes awry.
Finally, your 'tired' argument actually works against you. You are ADVOCATING that we go with your BST and then back it up with TCAS and yet you say that because I may have been tired in LAX after a long flight that I couldn't develop the 'picture'. Guess what, most crews arriving in Sydney between 0530 and 0800 in the morning will have a level of tiredness about them- either because they've been travelling all night or because they got up at anywhere between 0400 and 0530 to go to work. Similarly with MEL, BNE, CNS, PER, ADL, CBR, TVL, etc, etc.
Whilst I respect your knowledge of the CAOs, etc, and have used that knowledge a number of times, I guess the difference between your point of view and most of the rest of us is that whilst you are using the Big Skiy
'Theory', the rest of us are dealing with the
reality as we know it- and fly in it for 800 or so hours each year.