Hi all,
There's a lot of talk about situational awareness: all good stuff, and clearly attaining improved situational awareness is better. There are many ways to do this, looking out of the window I suppose is one, and looking at a TCAS screen is another.
But the radio can also be used to improve SA. We do it every time we arrive in the vicinity of an airfield, whether with "blind calls" on a A/G Radio frequency, or when listening out on an INFO or TWR frequency.
This is great for the high-density circuit environment: I think the suggestion of a dedicated A/A lane frequency as per Whirlybird on the previous thread is that this same advantage could be brought to other high traffic density environments such as the pinch-point traffic lanes to the north and south of London. It would be restricted to simple self-announcement of say "entering lane at [location], [level], routing to [exit point or airfield]"... it would only apply to airspace outside of the airfield ATZs, and would not involve controllers or other cost other than promulgating the regs and marking the charts, so it would be cheap and simple. I am not aware of a down-side to this suggestion... interested if others are.
The problem with the counter-proposal suggested by Whirlybird's CAA contact about just relying on the various airfield freq's and London Information when transiting such areas is that this does not enable you to gain SA regarding transiting traffic as generally speaking most people transiting don't call the airfield freqs, only those joining or departing e.g. Elstree etc., no-one much calls LOndon Info (unless crossing the channel or opening/closing a flight plan), and so it is very hit-and-miss (pardon the pun!) as to whether on a given frequency you happen to hear of any relevant traffic. It is also not very practical, as WB mentioned, to have to change between several of these in short succession.
But it seems the idea is unpopular, so it won't happen. Until then we all keep our eyes open as we do now, and remain "fat dumb and happy" about the converging targets we don't see!
Someone mentioned RIS doesn't work? Worked for me today... I had an FIS from Brize whilst over Oxford and Brize called me to say that there was traffic my level converging from SE, 1 mile: I looked in that direction and I saw him/her about 200' above. So it can work... but I accept that we have no chance of getting blanket LARS coverage and also that it doesn't always work so well, depending on controller workload.
TTFN,
Andy