Originally Posted by
peuce
Firstly .... a near misss is when two aircraft " nearly miss" ...
Ok fair enough, it was just a little unexpected to see something moving so fast so close outside, I'm just used to aircraft being several miles away (or lumbering over head, as I live about 3.5 miles from Manchester airport, directly under the usual approach path from Stockport).
I have no doubt that the flight crew had been well aware of the other aircraft for some considerable time before hand, and there was no danger of a collision.
Originally Posted by
peuce
Secondly ... aircraft look a lot closer than they actually are when you see them in flight... so, you probably were separated by the required parameters ... but it just doesn't look so.
I'm quite prepared to believe it was a perfectly safe distance away. I've turned up a page that says that aircraft shouldn't enter a volume 5 nautical miles (9km) horizontally and 1000 feet (300m) vertically around another.
They were definitely less than 5 nautical miles as at that distance it would have been a pretty small, but it may well have been 300m below us (nice use of mixed units there
). As you say judging distance accurately is hard and it is easy to be wrong by a large margin when trying to put a number to it.