Mr Guppy
I agree. It is important to compare and contrast reports.
For me it stretches creditability that anyone would operate an aircraft in a combat zone testing equipment which was unapproved and, in the EU at any rate, illegally installed. I don’t understand why you so regularly seek to impress us with your encounters with combat zones, small arms fire and the like. In my experience those involved in such arenas prefer to avoid talking about their experiences. For me, to be blunt, I think you have a fanciful imagination. Your posts would be more creditable if you did not allow your imagination to run riot.
I accept that on this forum and elsewhere there have been reports of ghost encounters using Xaon. Sometimes these reports rely on the traffic having not been visually acquired. I have yet to have a ghost encounter with TAS. I have however thought I have had a number. The last that comes to mind suggested traffic at a similar height at a range of about five miles. It was uncanny; pretty much as we turned the traffic turned, holding and maintaining station. We both looked and we never saw the traffic. Out of interest I asked AT if they had anything on radar. Sure enough they did, although even they seemed a little bemused as to why the traffic was not talking to them and had not been assigned a squawk.
The traffic was real. It demonstrated once again how late we often visually acquire traffic, assuming that is we ever see the traffic. I can recount numerous cases of traffic on TAS that has come very close and yet was never seen.
See and avoid doesn’t work. OK, that is a sweeping statement. In good visibility with relatively slow moving traffic it has a chance. In poor visibility with faster traffic the chances are poor. The FAA among others has conducted some interesting research – it is available on the internet and worth a read if this topic is close to your heart. In reality it is the big sky that keeps us safe most of the time.
As irrational as it maybe I like the idea of knowing about any traffic that gets really close. For me a relatively cheap unit that was able to warn me about traffic that was too close for comfort, even if sometimes those warnings were spurious, is a worth while investment. If the vast majority of those warnings were spurious I would conclude it was more trouble than it was worth. I don’t believe form my own experience with the Xaon that is remotely close to being the case.
For those reasons I have one, and use it whenever I fly without TAS.
(Ducks the incoming small arms fire.
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