This month’s Close Calls pilot has been flying for a while. He is IFR rated and has flown south to the Bahamas (from the Toronto, Canada area) and as far west as Los Angeles – most of it under instrument flight rules. On average, he logs about 120 hours a year. At a local flying club he initiated the exercise of group quizzes on ATC rules and air regulations as a way to pass through those winter weekends when he and his colleagues were grounded by the weather. He also runs a number of ATC procedures workshops and cross border flyout courses for the club's newer members.

Our pilot’s Close Call occurred on a VFR flight back to the Toronto area from London, Ontario – a popular journey for local pilots. He was using flight following that afternoon so was assigned a transponder code by ATC. Our pilot had just recently acquired his Beech Baron a few weeks earlier and was still getting familiar with the autopilot which was different to the one he previously had in his Mooney.

Runway 15 was in use at his destination so at about 12 miles out he contacted the tower requesting the localizer into runway 15. With that approved, he was asked to report reaching a nearby fix. Our pilot stresses that his intent was not to log an approach, but rather to simply let the autopilot fly it, and that this would basically be the same approach path any other VFR pilot would be on when coming in to land on 15. Our pilot kept watch outside the cockpit with only brief glances to the instruments and the Avidyne 500 which his TAS600 uses for traffic.  As this was a rather busy airport our pilot finds the Avidyne to be a great help in visualizing traffic.

A couple of miles short of the fix and out of 2200’ for 2000’ our pilot hears an alert from the TAS. "Traffic, same altitude, less than a mile.” “You get about 20 seconds warning with a voice alert,” advises our pilot, “a quick look at the box and a dive to the right and a Cessna 210 flashed over my head and to the left of me. I called the tower and told them about the near miss. After landing I spoke to the tower chief, who was in process of writing it up. After he apologized profusely for not alerting me, we then pieced together what happened…”

The Cessna was clearing the zone northbound as directed and was no conflict when suddenly and mysteriously it veered left and started tracking the localizer outbound. The tower was apparently short staffed and also instructing a new controller and missed the sudden change in course (hence the apology).

Exclaims our pilot, “I firmly believe without the TAS we would have hit! I’ve spent a fair bit of time with pilot passengers trying to spot traffic which we can see on Avidyne or as called out by ATC and so often you never see them even as close as a mile.” He continues, “I am convinced most near-midairs are missed not by ‘see and avoid’ but by the ‘big sky theory’. Thus, like you, I am a big proponent of traffic alerters of any type.”

Fly safe®.