jetstar close encounters thingy
Hi all,
I'm currently a PPL with a question regarding this controlled airspace/non controlled/ seperation minima and it's about jet* so I'll post it here instead of bugging the flight deck forums.
On a flight back from Japan in a Jet* airbus I had the pleasure of a window seat even though it was dark at some ridiculous time in the morning (3amish it was a while ago I can't remember now) and looking out the window I saw the lights of another aircraft.
Now given from a distance it can be hard to judge altitude particularly at night this aircraft appeared to be roughly the same altitude as us heading the same direction on a converging course. I continued to watch, wondering where it was headed watching it get closer and closer then suddenly I could see the red and green lights on both wings and the strobe as them or us had made a course change and it was now head on with my side of the aircraft. I wasn't particularly worried though it was close now and I was starting to wonder who was going to change course to avoid the other.
In the end I thought we were going to have a mid air collision. The aircraft passed us ridiculously close below us with a nose down attitude descending away from under our tail and also banking left away from us. It was so close that despite the fact it was the pitch black of night at 40,000ft I could clearly see the tail of the aircraft under it's lights and the fact the plane was whitish/grey colour (probably just dirty) with no logo/ colours painted on the tail of what I assume was probably a 737 or the like.
When the incident occured we would have been somewhere in the region west of Guam.
Just looking for comments/thoughts on the incident/non incident. I did look in the International section of the next Crash Comic CASA released to see if there were any mentions about close encounters but found nothing.