Originally Posted by
bingofuel
I am curious how you deal with the threat of aircraft who do not ‘announce their position’ ? There are many aircraft out there, some do not even have a radio ( shock , horror!) and the only realistic way to avoid getting close to them is to maintain a very good lookout utilising the mark 1 eyeball!
Originally Posted by
Maoraigh1
Agree with look out. To locate a position given relative to VOR will often take time looking at a map, paper or electronic..
So I should ignore the information I get from those who do announce their position?
I must say I find this conversation a bit strange. I hear that it's important that I have my 'eyes out', but that is the whole point of my suggestion. I want a super simple way of judging where I am relative to aircraft I hear on the radio, without fiddling around with charts or ipads. Glancing at 2 numbers every few minutes does not seem too demanding, should I also not occasionally glance at the T's and P's for fear of hitting something?
As I have said, I am sure that I am by far the least experienced, and I am here to learn, but I wonder if I am hearing a bit of puritanism from those who don't like it to be too easy? In my other activities, there used to be similar discussions, eg insistence that AIS or VHF is dangerous for collision avoidance, or shock horror at navigating by GPS. All these concerns are real, and misuse or blind over-reliance can be dangerous, but that does not mean you should not make appropriate use of all the tools at your disposal.
It may also be worth adding that I think the environment I fly in may be a little unusual. When I am flying cross-country at 9,500', those around me are mostly professional pilots who are IFR capable, but who choose to fly VFR 90% of the time. They are typically also flying unpressurised and slowish a/c such as Caravans (because they are mostly delivering tourists to small airstrips) and we are all looking for the best groundspeed, VMC, O2 and healthy terrain clearance, so we all end-up between 9,500 and 11,500. They have shiny G1000 cockpits and rarely bother with local reference points, and when they do it's often not a name that means anything to me. So when they finish-up with 'and showing 130 degrees and 55 miles from the NAVEX', that's a super useful piece of data for me that I would like to use appropriately.