Originally Posted by
PerPurumTonantes
I used to fly in the USA and if I remember correctly you could easily get a 'flight following' service giving deconfliction (can any US pilots confirm?) Was amazed to find that in the much more cramped UK airspace, LARS is seen as a luxury.
It's like the English feel awfully embarrassed to have to bother those busy chaps at Farnborough.
I hold both EASA & FAA licenses and fly in both countries. You cannot compare the US Aviation Infrastructure to that of the UK. The US has far greater govt support and funding.
To answer @PerPurumTonantes question: yes, you can easily get VFR flight following (aka VFR Advisories, aka Radar Traffic Information Service) on any flight where you can be tracked via transponder and controller workload permitting (good article
here). You get it by default when in Class B and C airspace. It can be difficult to get if you are flying at typical helicopter altitudes where only enroute radar coverage is available, i.e. if they can't track you reliably they can't offer you service. I generally only use it when I intend to enter Class B or C, and, when exiting same, will hang onto it for a while until I know that I'm going into an area where it isn't going to work out.
I recently installed Mode S in/out. I've never had traffic information available to me before and it sure is nice. After a few days of "playing with the new toy" it is now in my background scan. The voice will warn me of anything close. I leave the traffic display up on the panel GPS in case the tablet goes wonky, and have the tablet set to overlay traffic on the map display, so I get good situational awareness whenever I check the map.
You can still be "surprised" when in a TAS only area/altitude. It's actually kind of sobering when the technology picks up the traffic before you do. An object lesson, with multiple messages: a) you can always do a better job of scanning and b) the technology, used correctly, does add safety margin.