Unreported airprox?

[cheese bobcat]

A couple of days ago, I witnessed on Flightradar 24 two aircraft passing 53N/30W at FL380 within less than a minute.

Now are things this bad that in a non-radar environment two flights can be this close? One was a BA747 and the other an Airberlin A330.

Or is Flightradar24 not to be trusted? Or perhaps I'm missing something!

[kcockayne]

This Airprox could have happened, but I would initially put it down to FR24 vagaries. They are far from unknown. I watch my son flying all around Europe on FR 24 & some of the apparent situations he gets into would be very worrying if I had a simple faith in FR24 ! I would put my trust in the proven ATC system if I were you - until something official gets released.

[Airbubba]

Since, as you say, the aircraft were in a non-radar environment the following FR24 explanation may apply:

Estimations

When an aircraft is flying out of coverage Flightradar24 keeps estimating the position of the aircraft for up to 2 hours if the destination of the flight is known. For aircraft without known destination, position is estimated for up to 10 minutes. The position is calculated based on many different parameters and in most cases it's quite accurate, but for long flights the position can in worst cases be up to about 100 km (55 miles) off. In settings there is an option to set for how long time you want to see estimated aircraft on map.

https://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works

If you have a time and date, I'll be happy to see if I can view the conflict on FR24 history.

[DaveReidUK]

53N 30W is around 700 nm from the nearest land, so take any "position reports" generated by FlightRadar24 with a large pinch of salt as they will likely have been derived by extrapolation and have significant potential for error.