“Well, in my illustrious 270+ hours of recreational flying as aprivate pilot, I just yesterday had my closest near disaster” starts off thismonth’s Close Calls pilot. He hadn’t flown for a little while so thought he would “shoot a couple circuits before heading out for a local sight-seeingflight.” The first circuit went without anything of note taking place. On ourpilot’s second touch-and-go… well that was another story. 

A recently releasedTransportation Safety Board investigation report detailing a mid-air collisionstated that “A number of international studies have addressed the overall issueof risk of collision effectiveness of the see-and-avoid principle. Allacknowledged the underlying physiological limitations at play and that, whenmid-air collisions occur, “failure to see-and-avoid is due almost entire to thefailure to see.” One study stated that “our data suggest that the relativelylow (though unacceptable) rate of mid-air collisionsin general aviation aircraft not equipped with TCAS is as much a function ofthe ‘big sky’ as it is of effective visual scanning.” 

For the rest of my life Iwill remember 2008 as the year I took the pilot’s pilgrimage to Oshkosh for thevery first time. Those who know me know that I love my gadgets. So given thatyear in and year out EAA’s AirVenture sees the launch of the latest andgreatest aviation gadgetry, I’ve had to account for why I hadn’t yet made thetrip to Oshkosh. Well, no longer. 

Our pilot was an aerialphotographer based in southwestern Ontario who was on a job that would take himto the Thousand Islands region bordering Ontario and upstate New York. On theway he stopped in Peterborough, Ontario for fuel where he consulted with flightservices to examine a line of thunderstorms that had been pelting Ottawa to thenortheast throughout the day. The storms were heading southwest in a path thatwould eventually cross our pilots route. It was anticipated that the stormswouldn’t be near the Thousand Islands area for about two and a half hours whichwould leave better than a one hour buffer for our pilot. Or so he thought.