LOOKOUT H


HEADS-UP ON


Chances are those who haven’t flown for a while are going to have a higher workload than normal for the first few flights and one skill that’s likely to suffer is lookout


ow long do you reckon it takes from spotting another aircraft to hitting it – 30 seconds to a minute, maybe? It’s an understandable estimate but you’d be wrong.


If you’ve been unlucky enough to have a


very close encounter you’ll know you have nowhere near as long as even 30 seconds to take action; a bit like a slow motion train crash everything seems to take a long time until the last few moments when it all happens in split seconds.


Apart from those instinctive ‘jeez’ moments when push or pull simply comes down to a split-second of survival instinct, research shows that in normal circumstances the average pilot and aircraft needs anything from 9 to 12.5 seconds (about half as long as it’s taken to read to here…) from spotting another aircraft


to processing the closure geometry and avoiding a potential collision in a controlled manner. Take two PA-28s meeting head-on at around 90kt each, for example; there’s around ten seconds from the most eagle- eyed person being able to spot the other aircraft to impact. The crucial thing is that in the first five seconds little seems to happen with not much change in the size or motion of the oncoming PA-28, it’s only in the last five seconds that it suddenly blooms in size, the mind then takes a couple of seconds to process it as a threat leaving perhaps just three seconds to take action. Naturally, the odds of spotting a potential collision reduce in relation to the time spent looking out, hence the common 80:20 suggestion – 80 percent of the time looking out and just 20 percent inside the cockpit,


so even if you are a bit rusty with in-cockpit items it’s essential not to fixate on what’s going on inside the aircraft to the detriment of what’s happening outside.


But just ‘having a look’ for other aircraft isn’t enough, and here’s why. Even in a featureless sky the eyes tend to focus somewhere, but if there’s nothing specific to focus on they rather lazily revert to a relaxed intermediate distance which means you don’t necessarily see anything outside that range.


Most pilots know that when looking out you should shift glances and try to refocus at intervals, but just doing it randomly doesn’t really work; spotting a potential conflict needs an effective scan in front and to the side… You’ll probably be familiar with the problem of ‘constant relative bearing’, also known as ‘stationary in the field of view’,


SPRING 2021 CLUED UP 17


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