I had that happen in a 747 once. Your stomach just flips. Not something you expect on such large plane. The pilot said it was a “tea cast” maneuver to avoid a head on collision. He said the other plane was a half a mile ahead, which seemed like a long ways until I realized both planes were probably doing 600mph or something like that.
It’s TCAS. The Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System is an airborne system that helps pilots avoid mid-air collisions. It works independently of ground-based equipment by monitoring nearby aircraft with transponders and issuing advisories to pilots.
It basically negotiates between two planes and gives them opposing directions automatically so the pilots don’t “avoid” each other by going the same direction.
TCAS or the “Traffic Collision Avoidance System” is a system that monitors the local airspace around the aircraft, if it detects another aircraft’s transponder it will automatically exchange data with the other aircrafts, data like GPS position, altitude, speed, direction and more.
Then compares data received with it’s own, and determines the risk to the aircrafts involved, and if there is a risk of a mid air collision it will order the flight crew to take action and even cooperate with the other plane to order specific actions to both air crews.
One will be ordered to decend, the other to climb, and TCAS alerts are treated as a higher priority than even a controller.
I had that happen in a 747 once. Your stomach just flips. Not something you expect on such large plane. The pilot said it was a “tea cast” maneuver to avoid a head on collision. He said the other plane was a half a mile ahead, which seemed like a long ways until I realized both planes were probably doing 600mph or something like that.
It’s TCAS. The Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System is an airborne system that helps pilots avoid mid-air collisions. It works independently of ground-based equipment by monitoring nearby aircraft with transponders and issuing advisories to pilots.
It basically negotiates between two planes and gives them opposing directions automatically so the pilots don’t “avoid” each other by going the same direction.
Two planes dancing in a doorway unable to pass each other.
Which one gets to say “oohp”
TCAS, not “tea cast” (:
TCAS or the “Traffic Collision Avoidance System” is a system that monitors the local airspace around the aircraft, if it detects another aircraft’s transponder it will automatically exchange data with the other aircrafts, data like GPS position, altitude, speed, direction and more.
Then compares data received with it’s own, and determines the risk to the aircrafts involved, and if there is a risk of a mid air collision it will order the flight crew to take action and even cooperate with the other plane to order specific actions to both air crews.
One will be ordered to decend, the other to climb, and TCAS alerts are treated as a higher priority than even a controller.
Here you can read more about the systen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_system