Hello!
I thought this was a "private flying" spot in PPRuNe. ... For you, professional pilot, of course.
I can not see a major distinction between private and professional pilots. We all do the same "work", we share the same airspace, we have the same problems. There are days, when I am a private pilot too and there are days, when I teach people to become private pilots, that's why I read this part of the forum and a couple of flying magazines with great interest. It is like on the road: The same road is used by "private" and commercial drivers, and if I (private) collide with a taxi cab (professional) we both die, so we better should have talked to each other beforehand...
I really find it hard to believe that you think that maintaining situational awareness for people like me requires GPS.
It certainly does not require GPS, but GPS takes most of the "burden" of navigation from the pilot and frees his attention/resources for other duties.
And, I maintain that I'm sure I can maintain situational awareness without GPS.
This is exactly what I can't believe. Based on my own experience. Only yesterday, I did a two-hour VFR training flight with a CPL student. Visual navigation only with ad-hoc tasks to be performed (like the typical transition from instrument flight to visual flight for landing on a VFR-only airfield: You cancel IFR at some point and have to find your way into the traffic pattern by reference to ground features, often in marginal weather). Based on the discussion here, I observed my student a little closer than I usually would have done: She never - not once in two hours of flying! - looked anywhere but either on her map or straight down to the ground trying to identify railway tracks, rivers and roads (at one point, we were off by over 10 NM and she could still match the ground to the map, but that's a different story). We could have flown straight into an airship and she only would have noticed the very moment everything around her got dark (if it is dark inside an airship?). And mind you, she's not a private pilot who flies once every couple of weeks, but is on an integrated ATPL course flying every day for the last half year.
And about these TCAS events. Were these TAs or RAs? Were they VFR traffic infringing controlled airspace or traffic in the open FIR? And how would GPS have helped the situation?
I've had both TA (1) and RAs (2). Two of them happened in class F airspace (don't know if this exists anywhere else but in Germay - it allows instrument approaches and departures into airfields/airports that have no proper control zone - the lo-cost airlines like to use this kind of airfield because it saves them a lot of fees...). Especially in this kind of mixed VFR/IFR environment, the principle of "see and be seen" is very important and any unnecessary distraction from looking out is potentially dangerous.
Why so much emotion?
Maybe, because my life is at stake? In another post, you calculate the risks/probabilites of colliding with other traffic. My calculation goes like this: The more hours you fly, the higher the risk to collide with someone. And because I fly more hours than most private pilots, the only way to reduce my risk is to make others aware of these risks and to show them ways to reduce them. For their benefit and for mine.
Greetings, Max
One more thing to think about
: If GPS would have been around when Mr. Auster built his aeroplanes, and he would have fitted one in each of them (like he did with compass, ASI, altimeter and RPM indicator) - would anybody ever have questioned its usefulness?