Originally Posted by
Hacker15e
Are you kidding me? "See and avoid is unreliable"?
No, I'm not kidding you. It is unreliable. If "see and avoid" worked, there wouldn't be any collisions would there? Sure, it has saved my butt a few times already, but you can't be looking outside all the time. You get distracted by tasks inside the cockpit, and you may not have scanned a sector of the sky properly and thus didn't notice somebody. Perhaps you were climbing, or maybe the sky condition made it difficult to see traffic until it was really close.
Whatever the reason, it doesn't work. Now I'm not suggesting that we all get TCAS and then stop looking outside, but when you're buzzing along VFR at 1500ft without flight following, and somebody directly above you at 3000ft starts descending, you'll quickly appreciate the value of TCAS.
I'm not saying that we should switch to TCAS based separation, but it is an invaluable tool in avoiding collision.