Avoiding Collisions

A few weeks ago one of our members and I had a flight training session atop Wilkerson Pass. As we were doing our preflight checks, I suddenly heard the roar of C130 engines. Two of the humongous aircraft flew quite close over the pass at an altitude that I figured to be below 400’ AGL. We had no warning of their approach save a few seconds before they wisked by. Had we been in the air at the allowed 400’ AGL we would definitely have been close.

The FAA Safety Team recently posted a blog about avoiding collisions. To date most of the collisions and near misses have been with helicopters. It’s critical that we are quite aware of any heliports near our operating area and we take risk management steps to maintain well clear should we encounter one of these manned aircraft.

The blog has an interesting actual scenario that brought to mind better the requirement to be able to monitor the airspace around your operation. Check out the blog here!

While you’re at it, if you aren’t registered with FAA Safety please do so right away! Venture over to FAASafety.gov and register. Here you will find lots of great information about unmanned aircraft operations along side of manned aviation. In addition, this is where you take your FAA-required recurrent test.