Possible Pilot Deviation

It's too bad a new pilot has to have this as one of his first experiences probably after getting his ticket. I'm sure it's a valuable lesson though. I give you credit for venturing I to the bee hive early on. I have New York's class B right near me and I've gone through it twice only with an instructor.

The only thing that is a little troubling to me about the OP is he has said repeatedly that he assumed the 737 was climbing because it was departing. That's a reasonable assumption but assuming things in life never ends well. The more accurate conclusion is ATC has te situation under control. I'm not of the mind that ATC is not to be trusted. I explicitly do trust them but I will save myself first. A CFI once told me that if ATC makes a mistake they keep breathing, if a pilot makes a mistake, we stop breathing. I keep those words in mind every time I receive an order from ATC and I'll readily question them each time I'm inadvertently placed in a dangerous spot( this has happened only 1 time in 4 years of flying during a very similar situation to yours where I was flying near a air force cargo jet that was huge-- I just asked his altitude and then made sure to fly my altitude on the number. In this case though,ATC had this situation completely under control and a pilots assumption made it dangerous.

I'm sure this will pass and all will be learned. I hope the OP keeps flying!
 
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I've been reading through this and can see how a new pilot could misread
what's going on. One thing that comes to mind is situational awareness.
Was the 737 on the same frequency? It's easy to block out everything on
the radio except those containing our own call sign. But listening to radio calls to other aircraft can give you a mental picture of traffic. I know this is harder in B space .. but it all helps.

RT
 
jspilot said:
The only thing that is a little troubling to me about the OP is he has said repeatedly that he assumed the 737 was climbing because it was departing. That's a reasonable assumption but assuming things in life never ends well. The more accurate conclusion is ATC has te situation under control. I'm not of the mind that ATC is not to be trusted. I explicitly do trust them but I will save myself first. A CFI once told me that if ATC makes a mistake they keep breathing, if a pilot makes a mistake, we stop breathing. I keep those words in mind every time I receive an order from ATC and I'll readily question them each time I'm inadvertently placed in a dangerous spot( this has happened only 1 time in 4 years of flying during a very similar situation to yours where I was flying near a air force cargo jet that was huge-- I just asked his altitude and then made sure to fly my altitude on the number. In this case though,ATC had this situation completely under control and a pilots assumption made it dangerous.
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He's wrong. There are pilots breathing today who have experienced controller mistakes. There are pilots breathing today who have experienced pilot mistakes. Of the pilots not breathing today the reason is far more likely to have been due to a pilot mistake than to a controller mistake.
 
roncachamp said:
He's wrong. There are pilots breathing today who have experienced controller mistakes. There are pilots breathing today who have experienced pilot mistakes. Of the pilots not breathing today the reason is far more likely to have been due to a pilot mistake than to a controller mistake.
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Of course- but the CFI's point is that if a controller issues a bad clearance or instruction they still go home that night. If the pilot blindly follows that bad clearance or instruction, they often do not.
 
Suggestion: there is a lot of good info here, but it would probably be a good idea for the OP to get an hour or two of ground to go over it with a live CFI. Something tells me that, if there is a conversation with the faa, the fact that you've sought out training in this area already will go a long ways (and POA doesn't count! :) )
 
roncachamp said:
He's wrong. There are pilots breathing today who have experienced controller mistakes. There are pilots breathing today who have experienced pilot mistakes. Of the pilots not breathing today the reason is far more likely to have been due to a pilot mistake than to a controller mistake.
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Point taken, but the real message is that regardless of who makes the error, the only one who may get killed is the pilot (the possibility of crashing into the ATC facility and that Swiss controller knifed to death by the angry father of one of the people killed by that controller's error notwithstanding), so at the end of the day, the pilot better make damn sure s/he's not getting hosed by a controller error.
 
jspilot said:
Of course- but the CFI's point is that if a controller issues a bad clearance or instruction they still go home that night. If the pilot blindly follows that bad clearance or instruction, they often do not.
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Often? What's the evidence of that? How does the total number of bad clearances or instructions compare to the number of bad clearances or instructions that prevented a pilot from going home that night?
 
You might need an electron microscope to pick those nits.
 
737 had him on TCAS. Even if ATC did screw up, they would've seen the OP and done evasive action. Does ATC on rare occasions assign commands that end up losing appropriate separation? Yep, but they don't give you a traffic call first in Class B airspace. ATC had this situation under control. If they didn't the OP would've gotten a traffic alert (additional instructions) and not a normal traffic call.
 
Velocity173 said:
Does ATC on rare occasions assign commands that end up losing appropriate separation? Yep, but they don't give you a traffic call first in Class B airspace. ATC had this situation under control. If they didn't the OP would've gotten a traffic alert (additional instructions) and not a normal traffic call.
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I'm sure that's true almost all the time, but no one's infallible.
 
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Palmpilot said:
I'm sure that's true almost all the time, but no one's infallible.
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True, but we can count on our fingers how many times ATC has directed people into an accident, while the the amount of pilot failures resulting in deaths requires a significant database to track.
 
Ron Levy said:
Point taken, but the real message is that regardless of who makes the error, the only one who may get killed is the pilot (the possibility of crashing into the ATC facility and that Swiss controller knifed to death by the angry father of one of the people killed by that controller's error notwithstanding), so at the end of the day, the pilot better make damn sure s/he's not getting hosed by a controller error.
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Another real message: When a CFI asserts something that sounds like a load of crap, challenge the assertion.
 
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Henning said:
True, but we can count on our fingers how many times ATC has directed people into an accident, while the the amount of pilot failures resulting in deaths requires a significant database to track.
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I suspect the number of times that ATC has "directed people into an accident" exceeds ten, but if your basic point is that it's rare, I agree with you.
 
roncachamp said:
Another real message: When a CFI asserts something that sounds like a load of crap, challenge the assertion.
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Actually, though overstated, it didn't sound like a load of crap to me. And even the portion you bolded in your quote, Steven, I don't think said what you thought it did. It referred to the consequences of *pilot* error, not the consequences to the pilot of *controller* error.

I think it's incontrovertible, that pilot error is far likelier to kill the pilot, than controller error is to kill the controller.
 
wlawr005 said:
That's called constant bearing, decreasing range (CBDR).
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If there's one thing I'll never forget from my Navy training it's CBDR. They beat that into our heads repeatedly. And then beat some more.
 
Bill Jennings said:
If there's one thing I'll never forget from my Navy training it's CBDR. They beat that into our heads repeatedly. And then beat some more.
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It's the Continuous Bearing part that gives us trouble. It's much more difficult to spot traffic on a collision course than something we will miss because it lacks motion, and our vision cues on motion. That's why it's important to move your head as well as your eyes when scanning for traffic.
 
azure said:
Actually, though overstated, it didn't sound like a load of crap to me. And even the portion you bolded in your quote, Steven, I don't think said what you thought it did. It referred to the consequences of *pilot* error, not the consequences to the pilot of *controller* error.
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If it's not a load of crap you'd have to believe that all living pilots are mistake-free.
 
Bill Jennings said:
If there's one thing I'll never forget from my Navy training it's CBDR. They beat that into our heads repeatedly. And then beat some more.
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Nothing like throwing your belly up at lead to get his blood pumping.
 
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Bill Jennings said:
If there's one thing I'll never forget from my Navy training it's CBDR. They beat that into our heads repeatedly. And then beat some more.
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True, but in a boat, you're all at the same "altitude". CBDR doesn't mean as much in the air when you have the possibility of vertical separation.

And I'll state right now that it can be HARD to determine vertical separation of 500 feet when you're looking at a 737 a few miles away and closing.

Normally, whenever I've gotten a traffic call in class B, the controllers always state the relative bearing (3 O'Clock), the type (737), and the vertical information (level at XXXX, XXXX and climbing/descending), and tell me if they'll pass above or below me. That reassures me that staying at my assigned altitude is the right thing to do. One time I had a 747 pass 500 feet below me near Dulles while I was in a 172. That was really cool.
 
Now there is one thing that scares me here.

I've had a transponder anomaly in Class C before, right below a Class B floor. Approach thought I was in Class B and repeatedly asked me to "say altitude," which I did, and it was 100 feet below the floor. And had I really been in Class B, that would have almost certainly resulted in RAs. It's a real bad spot, pretty close to the FAF for SFO 28R.

The altimeter had been calibrated on the ground -- I do this routinely, every flight -- by comparing it to field altitude. It was less than 10 feet off.

So, we've established that the transponder is not reporting the correct altitude, and told Approach. But they still give traffic reports about me to other aircraft using the transponder-reported altitude. That's a 200 foot error in that particular case. If reported separation is only 500 feet vertically, there is a problem there.
 
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MAKG1 said:
Now there is one thing that scares me here.

I've had a transponder anomaly in Class C before, right below a Class B floor. Approach thought I was in Class B and repeatedly asked me to "say altitude," which I did, and it was 100 feet below the floor. And had I really been in Class B, that would have almost certainly resulted in RAs. It's a real bad spot, pretty close to the FAF for SFO 28R.

The altimeter had been calibrated on the ground -- I do this routinely, every flight -- by comparing it to field altitude. It was less than 10 feet off.

So, we've established that the transponder is not reporting the correct altitude, and told Approach. But they still give traffic reports about me to other aircraft using the transponder-reported altitude. That's a 200 foot error in that particular case. If reported separation is only 500 feet vertically, there is a problem there.
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200 ft is fine. 300 or more is bad. Even then, you'll just be told to stop altitude squawk. Transponder errors become a problem for the computer "snitch patch" but it's not something you need to worry about.
 
roncachamp said:
If it's not a load of crap you'd have to believe that all living pilots are mistake-free.
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Depends on your definition of a load of crap. According to mine, there would have to be no truth in it at all. If you read beyond the literal meaning of the words, there's a great deal of truth in it - as I said, it's just overstated.
 
azure said:
Depends on your definition of a load of crap. According to mine, there would have to be no truth in it at all. If you read beyond the literal meaning of the words, there's a great deal of truth in it - as I said, it's just overstated.
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Load of crap
 
TMetzinger said:
True, but in a boat, you're all at the same "altitude". CBDR doesn't mean as much in the air when you have the possibility of vertical separation.

And I'll state right now that it can be HARD to determine vertical separation of 500 feet when you're looking at a 737 a few miles away and closing.

Normally, whenever I've gotten a traffic call in class B, the controllers always state the relative bearing (3 O'Clock), the type (737), and the vertical information (level at XXXX, XXXX and climbing/descending), and tell me if they'll pass above or below me. That reassures me that staying at my assigned altitude is the right thing to do. One time I had a 747 pass 500 feet below me near Dulles while I was in a 172. That was really cool.
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Sure it does, if you have vertical separation the target will move up or down in your view as the distance closes.

As for the call from ATC, agreed, normally I get more info on the traffic than just "See it?"
 
roncachamp said:
Often? What's the evidence of that? How does the total number of bad clearances or instructions compare to the number of bad clearances or instructions that prevented a pilot from going home that night?
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I honestly believe you must just be looking to fight here. The point the CFI made and one I understand is that, if a controller issue an instruction or clearance that is a mistake, they are not the ones actually in the plane. So if a pilot blindly follows said instruction, it is the pilot who pays for that error. I'm not talking about small ATC errors, or small pilot errors. I'm talking about the importance of pilots knowing the situation they are in, and evaluating the safety of the situation at all times so as to avoid situations like what was described in the OP, where the pilot lost awareness and then took incorrect evasive action.
 
jspilot said:
I honestly believe you must just be looking to fight here. The point the CFI made and one I understand is that, if a controller issue an instruction or clearance that is a mistake, they are not the ones actually in the plane. So if a pilot blindly follows said instruction, it is the pilot who pays for that error. I'm not talking about small ATC errors, or small pilot errors. I'm talking about the importance of pilots knowing the situation they are in, and evaluating the safety of the situation at all times so as to avoid situations like what was described in the OP, where the pilot lost awareness and then took incorrect evasive action.
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I was responding to the actual meaning of the words that were used.
 
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