I think people are being too harsh on Paulo. It's all very well saying things like
How about keeping your mouth shut and flying the aeroplane according to the rules
There is far too much reliance on the radio these days and not enough on lookout and plain old airmanship
but there are times where you just don't see other traffic no matter how hard you look. Last weekend I arrived back at Goodwood from the north (in the RHS, with another Goodwood-based pilot flying) and traffic called overhead just before we joined overhead. Between us we've probably done that join a hundred times, we knew exactly where the traffic must be and we had two pilots looking... but it was against the backdrop of Chichester and we just could not see it. That's how it goes sometimes.
Surely good airmanship is using the resources available to you?We couldn't see the traffic, so we asked over the radio once we were deadside as the other traffic still hadn't called crosswind as requested and could still possibly be in the overhead, unseen by us. It's all very well saying that if we both played by the rules nothing would happen, but i'm not going to just continue blindly assuming that the other pilot is going to be correct - we've all screwed up the join at an unfamiliar airfield. We got a "crosswind" call back, which eased our nerves and we eventually saw it downwind once we were crosswind, it was a couple of miles ahead of us the whole time. In Paulo's case it sounds like it got a bit close and could have been sorted out earlier, but don't give the guy a slagging for asking.