Looking for Traffic

"This would be a good time for a midair."

I wasn't trying to spoil the party when I said it. Under the circumstances it was simply true, and it couldn't hurt to point it out. The Cessna Skylane carrying my friend, his two young sons, and me was entering classic midair collision conditions: a clear Saturday morning, descending over a VOR, inbound to a nontowered airport some four miles away. Radar approach control had just bade us farewell, advising that there were "numerous targets in the vicinity of the Sanford [Maine] Regional Airport." Probably there were numerous targets in the coffee shop too. Yes, the common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF) was abuzz. One or two of the reported positions bore eerie resemblance to our own. Not wishing to litter the landscape with aluminum, we scanned vigorously.

I was looking out the side window for reported traffic when a young voice in the rear piped up suddenly: "Daddy — an airplane!" Nathaniel wasn't wearing a headset when he shouted the words, but his penetrating voice easily reached our ears. We followed his pointing finger and instantly I found myself looking into the lower right-hand portion of a fuselage. Not a speck in the distance, but an airplane. Right here, right now. A single-engine Cessna. A taildragger. A Cessna 170 — with that distinctive rounded rudder — and it was nosed up in a climbing left turn. I pushed forward on my yoke. So did the other pilot. The 170 passed overhead.

We talked it over in the coffee shop but could find no fault with our methods. Landing light: on. CTAF frequency: monitored. Position report: made. Traffic scan: in progress by both pilots, in all quadrants. The other aircraft might not have been visible below us until the very last second — and by then our scanning and other announcements may have caused us to have been looking elsewhere. Just one of those things. But it was a perfect example of the old adage that many collisions occur on nice days, in the vicinity of the traffic pattern, at a nontowered airport. Using a VOR as a nav aid increases the likelihood of converging because the very nature of VORs makes them "magnets" for aircraft — especially when one is navigating with a "To" showing on the "To/From" indicator. I have always been rather picky about scanning for traffic — and teaching awareness of this chore — but this early-morning wake-up call elevated my emphasis on the subject to an almost fanatical level for a time thereafter, as pilots who flew with me then might attest. It also caused me to think about the pilot behavior that increases and decreases the risk of targets merging in the sky.

Even in busy airspace, it is easy to fall into the "big-sky" mind-set in which a pilot looks out at vastness and believes with almost hypoxic conviction that a collision could not possibly occur up here.

Why else do so many pilots fly along for minutes at a time fiddling with instruments, autopilots, or nav systems without as much as a glance outside? Why do some (fortunately, very few) fly illegal IFR? Why do so many pilots, consciously or otherwise, cease to scan for traffic the instant that they have established contact with an ATC facility for radar flight following?

The training area near my home field is a fine place to learn why trusting traffic advisories exclusively can be such a bad idea. Radar does not spot all traffic, and work load may not permit the controllers to call out everything they see. Floatplanes take off from lakes and streams and pop up in your face with interesting suddenness. Traffic departing from private strips or satellite airports may transit the Class C airspace just beneath radar coverage. Primary targets can be pointed out to you only as "type and altitude unknown." Sometimes we give the advisories to them: "OK, that one is a floatplane down low, descending into the seaplane base. Shouldn't be a factor."

And in many places there is no radar coverage below the minimum altitudes on the airways. At outlying fields there are numerous no-radio aircraft making use of the facilities. Many of these are painted dark colors that blend with the terrain. In a few cases this scenario is compounded by the pilots' use of homemade traffic patterns and nonstandard altitudes (usually very low). Some of you might be tempted to say that this should not be allowed to happen in this day and age — but it does, and it will continue, and an airplane that shouldn't be there can knock you out of the sky as effectively as one that should.

But for their unpredictability, I am glad these old-timers are still flitting about, nibbling at the fringes of modern aviation and shunning its gizmos and complications. The lesson here: Don't just scan the pattern that you were taught to fly. Scan the oddball patterns, too, because on final is the place where the two will intersect.

That said, let us not forget that the hazards can be just as great at the opposite end of the aviation spectrum, in the realm of sleekness, speed, and sophistication. Pilots are products of their environment, and they do not always make the transition to other circumstances in perfect style. During a day of flying for-hire scenics above our coastal vista several years ago, I taxied back in from a flight and saw that one of my fellow pilots was waiting to speak to me. On his face was the kind of expression you'd wear if you were conversing with a ghost. "Did you see that King Air on final fly over you?" he asked in excitement. "Did you catch his wake?" I said that I had not. Apparently the folks on the ramp had watched in dismay as two single-engine Cessnas on final approach — another company aircraft and mine — had been overtaken by the twin. No one had heard the big Beech call in — but there he was. On short final he realized what was shaping up and he went around. The spectators said that it had been very close.

I had seen similar incidents at that particular airport. The usual cause was that a fast aircraft on an IFR flight plan was released to the advisory frequency by ATC on about a five-mile final. The pilot then would either make a position report very late in the game, or not at all. Talking to a few of the pilots, I realized that they labored under the erroneous assumption that a nontowered airport on the Maine coast could not possibly have much traffic. Their guard was down, so the risk went up. What cured them was learning that the national park over which we fly receives several million visitors a year, many arriving or sightseeing by air.

Sightseeing is also a phase of flight during which the cautious pilot should remain attentive. Many aircraft — everything from commuter airliners and corporate jets to homebuilts — sometimes deviate from regular arrivals and departures to circle that local national park, or to view that luxury liner docked in the harbor, or even just to contemplate a moose luxuriating in a mud puddle.

And then there's the really odd stuff. Giving a tour one day, I was astonished to find an aerobat practicing his loops and spins over the bay, a mere mile outside the traffic pattern. And speaking of traffic patterns: Where do you join the downwind at a busy airport? Midfield? At the departure end? A few miles away? Do you overfly the field when entering from the crosswind leg? Everyone still has his or her own idea about what to do, and the debate rages on. How wide should a traffic pattern be flown? The CFI's perspective on this is that it would be nice to be able to glide to the field if the engine suddenly quit. Other pilots seem content to have a vague view of the distant airport out the side window when they fly in "the pattern." If you are concerned that a reported aircraft is not where it "should" be, it is perfectly acceptable to ask diplomatically for a more detailed position report. If something in the other pilot's voice undermines your confidence in that idea, try asking, "Bonanza on the wide left base, do you have the green Cessna in sight at your 12 o'clock?" That might get his attention.

Position reports should be brief but informative. I hammer this into students almost as fanatically as I demand that they turn on their landing lights when approaching airports or other busy airspace, even on dazzlingly beautiful days. A bad position report sounds like this: "Old Town traffic, Cessna Three-Four-Five is five miles out, landing Runway 30." You hear lots of those. Another variety of the bad position report is the type made by some IFR aircraft: "Augusta traffic, twin Cessna is DUNNS inbound, full stop."

Much better than report number one is "Old Town traffic, Cessna Three-Four-Five is five miles southwest, over the lake at 1,200 feet. We will be entering the downwind for Runway 30." As for the IFR position report given above, I often wonder: Did that pilot think that all VFR or student pilots would know where — let alone what — DUNNS is? Yet this is often all they offer as a position description. (DUNNS is the nondirectional beacon located about 6 nm north of Old Town's Runway 17.)

Former AOPA President John Baker used to quip that the risk of collision has been with us "ever since Wilbur turned to Orville and said, 'Let's build another one.'" There is a lot we can do to minimize that risk. But we do not have the luxury of employing these techniques only on those occasions that we feel would be "a good time for a midair." This is why there is such an emphasis on checkrides of performing "clearing turns" before each maneuver — it shows that the pilot is thinking "collision avoidance" all the time. Only the authorities have the luxury of concluding certain accident reports with the causal pronouncement, "failure to see and avoid." In such a case the unlucky pilot gets no credit for all the ones that we never saw but did manage to avoid on luckier days, or avoided when the pair of young eyes in the back seat saved the day. Thanks, Nathaniel!