Chuckles me old.
In my part of the world where I guess maybe more than 60% of the hours and revenue is earned we mostly operate high performance aircraft (with TCAS) and gaggles of 19-30 seat Dash 8, Braz, Metro and B1900 (I expect with TCAS???) into often superb mining strips surrounded by many others in close proximity also populated by the charter 210's, 310's and Chieftains over and surrounded by the pastoral areas alive with mustering types in the season and the usual mix of C172 etc commuting into Karratha, Hedland Broome, Carnarvon for the mail and groceries.
And dont even get me started on the RPTs into Kalgoorlie, Broome et al.
All talking to Melbourne and Brisbane and each other and all arriving and departing within a 60 or so minute period at each end of the day.
No probs amongst themselves, it's the latterthe aircraft that puddle around in "G" 99% of the time that gets the pucker factor waaaaaay up there.
It looked for a while like they were going to get ADSB at a highly subsidised rate that would have solved ALL our problems but something happened along the way.
Now if you were to subsidise Transponders for these blokes, and they are a sight cheaper I suspect you would be a long way to home.
Which begs the question, what happened to the ADSB that I understood was the logical answer? I know we have had a long debate about it here but what was propsed seemed to make perfect sense to me for Australias unique aviation landscape. And I'm not talking about the J curve, its about the other 80% of Australia.
The US is a fair way along with NGATS.
http://www.faa.gov/news/updates/ADS-B/
and then there is this;
http://www.faa.gov/and/and500/500/do...Y_BULLETIN.pdf
Are newbies to this technology not in a solid structured mainline airline training system vis a vis the abovementioned FIFI operators going to need more training on TCAS than ADSB?
It seems there is no silver bullet.