Looking Out The Window

This I know: If you see something with your own two eyes, you probably can avoid it. Happened to me just last month. A regional airliner, working with ATC, was approaching its destination. I was working my way around the Class C airspace, at the center of which the airliner was aimed.

Amy Laboda

Tuesday, September 16, 2014 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Pilots must prioritize actively looking outside the cockpit to visually scan for traffic, weather, and terrain, as this provides crucial real-time information that technology may miss or misrepresent.
Modern cockpit technology, including EFIS, GPS, and weather displays, offers valuable data but has inherent limitations, such as data lag, incomplete traffic information, and unmapped obstacles, necessitating visual verification.
Over-reliance on automation and a failure to correlate cockpit information with the actual visual environment can lead to critical errors and accidents, as tragically exemplified by the Asiana 214 crash.

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I saw him first as an ADS-B target on my EFIS screen, a simple white diamond with a predicted (that’s important) trajectory, some 20 miles away. I looked up to search for him in my windscreen, even so. I always look up and out, no matter my flight conditions. Here’s why: Closing speeds what they were (around 450 knots), the distance between us closed in what felt like an instant. And there he was, right where I’d guessed and where ADS-B predicted.