What to do about it?
 

You, nothing, mad_jock, thanks. As you say, the company and its captains are the people to convince of the doubtful airmanship of this practice. I have already raised the subject with the CAA, Cambridge CC and a couple of locals. My MP is now SofS for Health, malhereusement, so he will be v.v. busy, but I have hopes of a PQ, nonetheless.

My reason for braving the "lion's den", as it were, was to canvass opinion and to find out what makes good practice as far as professional controllers are concerned. Apart from the odd spurious question about my professional capacity :), it has been a fruitful exercise, thanks to people like you.

B0W

You may find that after you fit a radio and transponder into the glider (weight/cost permitting), yourself and others can have a greater awareness of what's going around?

If you're flying in uncontrolled airspace, anything else can randomly fly in it as well. I know it may not come across as something easy to digest.

Powered aircraft pilots (pistons, jets, etc.) could be equally concerned too. I've heard of someone who's been flying through cloud in Class-G and nearly had a glider wrapped around it. You cannot see-and-avoid in such conditions.

A solution is to have more controlled airspace in your area to keep things separated.

But pretty please - no more low-level class A. That kicks me (a non-IR pilot) out!

I think you would be shocked to learn how little input Captains would have to stop this practise. Submit an ASR on it get the reply safety assement says its acceptable for none public transport flights.

Another line of attack would be to use CHIRP.

Prove that system is 100% accurate in terms of aircraft position and level please. I suspect it's not.

If you really want to improve safety for all, then I'd lobby them to make Mode S mandatory in gliders, as well as all other aircraft. That way the various collision avoidance systems can do their job and safety is enhanced for everyone. If the country wasn't in such a financial mess, you could even ask the taxpayers for some funding assistance for the equipment ? :O

The only other solution is Controlled Airspace everywhere, but then you run in to all sorts of arguments about freedoms, service provision, costs, access, etc, etc, etc.

Or you can accept that other airspace users are entitled to operate in Class G and that 'see and be seen' applies to all as a method of collision avoidance. Everyone has the right to be there, everyone also needs to apply high standards of airmanship and put away their elitism.

This is just nonsense! So uncontrolled airspace is exclusively for gliders? Back to your club house in your 'LOOP' polo shirt, farah slacks with Nokia phone on belt and mountaineering shoes where you can discuss your bizarre perspective with other bad-breathed glider pilots with dirty beards 'till your heart's content!

Uncontrolled airspace DOES NOT mean that it is controlled by GLIDERS.

That also describes a few ATCOs I know :p

Haha! ATCOs are a weird mix! You get some like described then the others that have their lips sealed around pints....!

A good few years back I used to deal with noise and track complaints from the public, including people who 'knew' what altitudes aircraft were supposed to be flying at and what altitude they reported them flying at in their complaints. I can't recall a single example of the hundreds of complaints that I recorded and analysed where a complainant stated the height that the aircraft was flying at, was correct. The allegation altitude was always way way too low to that actually recorded. The complainants also included previous pilots and other 'experts' makibng all sorts of assumptions from their knowledge or lack of about what they were actually seeing. The easiest comparison I used to make was with witness reports and how they vary to any given event, a good case being the Biggin Hill Biz jet accident, where despite many seeing it, there was not a conclusive set of witness accounts that gave a reliable picture of the event.

I'd also question the data accuracy of the picture above too, particularly how the altitude displayed is matched to QNH and a whole host of data correlation and verification, not least of which is geographical map, to radar overlay of that specific map and recorded track correlation. Getting those correct is a long laborious process, ask anyone who's done it :ooh: , and involves a bit more than buying a map from a supplier and sticking it underneath a radar track ...

I used to test myself, watching a typical aircraft B737, guess its height over the airfield and then replay the recording. If I got withing 500ft of the altitude I was very lucky, despite doing this many many times. If I couldn't do it accurately, despite being involved in it as my day job, the chances of a 'lay' person doing it accurately are even more remote.

As both a glider and commercial pilot often operating outside of controlled airspace, this is something that I've thought about often. I don't panic or lose sleep over it, but the growing trend of CAT outside of CAS does leave with a increasing sense of inevitable conflicts in the future.

I don't fly airline equipment and the five-ton aircraft I do operate is probably the limit of what I'd personally deem comfortable operating OCAS on a lovely summer weekend such as this one.

Two things;

Good catch, but does this make the best example of your case under scrutiny? Precisely because Lasham is one of the busiest gliding sites in the country, crews flying larger aircraft surely brief in detail the surrounding lack of controlled airspace and the nature of flying activities in the vicinity. Furthermore, the gliding clubs based at Lasham also do brief their guys when large aircraft movements are expected and the glider-types understand the directions that approaching and departing big iron will take. And they avoid it. And it all works well, just as you say; but it works well because both teams know what to expect.

Compare that with, say, an Air EasyRyan Jet re-positioner flying VFR OCAS. If the route is, say, East Mids to Luton then perhaps there is no need to brief an arrival into a GA field. Only the route. A friend of mine works for one such company synonymous with a particular colour of the rainbow. He once told me a story of how (just as mad jock suggested) he and his captain were invited to ferry an aircraft outside of controlled airspace only to find no VFR charts in the aircraft, only airways charts. Great. They show all the controlled airspace, but they handily don't show where the gliding sites are. Useful that... Naturally, commercial pressure won the day. Not quite the same 'joined-up thinking' and team play of Lasham, I suspect.

:hmm:

That's all well and good but as previously mentioned on the thread, weight and the lack of a suitable electrical supply on board some types either puts paid to it, or mandates such aircraft out of the airspace. To give you a context; the Ka-6 I used to fly was so weight limited that the pilot had to be more than 9 stone (ish) and less than 12.5 (ish). Otherwise, the aircraft was out of c-of-g limits. Strapping a Mode S and corresponding 12-volt battery into the aircraft would be just lovely, if it wasn't impractical.

The gliding community have been waiting patiently for the much-touted 'lightweight, low-power Mode S' unit that they were confidently told by the powers-that-be "would be developed" by someone along with the rollout of Mode S. Only it never came. So what next? Rule out that sector of aviation from Class G?

Airliners should not be excluded either, far from it. Open FIR for a reason. But all aircraft should be operated in a way which is commensurate with 'see and avoid', if necessary. That means relative airspeed, maneouverability and lookout as required. If certain CAT movements, even positioning ones, cannot be flown slowly enough, or the a/c flightpath altered quickly enough, or if the windows are too small or the cockpit workload too high to maintain adequate lookout, it is encumbant upon them not to go, or to go inside CAS and with the protection it affords them.

Sadly, I fear that at the moment, many large/heavy/fast aircraft operated OCAS may not be adhering to such basic tenets of airmanship. And the "ban/Mode S/geographically limit the gliders" brigade are just pandering to that.

p.s. I think the low-level mil thing is something of a red herring in terms of airprox with gliders. Most fast-and-pointy mil stuff, in my experience, has generally (but not entirely) been well below 'gliding altitudes' or well above it. The most frequent military traffic experienced at soaring levels tends to be rotary. Caveat: in my experience.

Heights and Altitudes
 

Yes, it is very difficult to estimate heights, but ADS-B readouts are from the transponder, I believe, which uses 1013 as the datum, so where is the difficulty with that, on a standard day?

McD

Aha Mcduff,
What was the pressure at the time that the aircraft was flying over head? If it was today or yesterday i would wager that it was higher than 1013.
I wont give any clues on how to work out it's true altitude we will have more fun arguing over that for the next couple of days:O

True altitude?
 

Well, zkdli, the Chatham was 1025 on Friday, I seem to remember, so that's about 12mb difference; at sea level that would be in the region of 400ft. But that's immaterial, really, since it was below 3,000ft over the glider site and it *looked* low.

But if you have a cool method of calculation, do tell ... ;)

BoW