Report, or let it go?

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The pilot watched top gun movies too many times. You were just an unwilling participant in his games.
 
I get the annoyance and question: kinda like someone walking behind you and repeatedly stomping on your shadow or something.

What if he had intentionally, repeatedly come directly at you - but 2,000ft (1/3mi) above or below? Even 1,000ft. Or 500. I mean, separation is separation even if it feels different in the horizontal.

Unless the guy's a looney and wanting to kill you as part of his suicide, it seems to me he's not going to "engage" until he clearly has a visual on you and maintains it, for his own safety.

I've heard of a guy on our field who rejoined closely on someone's wing on the way to a breakfast run to "surprise" them (before ADS-B was widely available). Now THAT's, well, ill-advised, IMHO.
 
bflynn said:
Weird, something similar happened to me. After being out practicing VFR maneuvers, I noticed an airplane head on to me. Since it was time to go home, I turned left to go back to the airport and get out of the way, but they turned to match me! I descended, they descended. Weirdest thing that I've seen. After passing him, I turned to follow him so I could make sure I got his tail number. Behavior like this needs to be reported!
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Wait a minute... so, you were "followed" by another aircraft and your feelings were hurt by it, so then you turned and followed him close enough to read his tail number?? Dang man, that's dangerous! You should be reported to the FAA!!

Yep, I'm just pointing out the silliness of this thread and the subject at hand; some of you are making mountains out of molehills here.
 
Is it bad that I am picturing this goofball flying an RV also? :D That seems really on-brand for the overhead break and surplus jumpsuit crowd.
 
murphey said:
Sidenote: Can we please stop using the "karen" as a derogatory term? No one's name should be used like this, regardless of the situation.
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Too late. That cat's been out-of-the-bag for a LONG time now (in Internet terms) and it's not going back in anytime soon.

Karen is pretty much perma-vilified.
 
murphey said:
Sidenote: Can we please stop using the "karen" as a derogatory term? No one's name should be used like this, regardless of the situation.
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Agreed! Really makes no sense to me why or how such a thing ever became a thing ...
 
jbDC9 said:
Wait a minute... so, you were "followed" by another aircraft and your feelings were hurt by it, so then you turned and followed him close enough to read his tail number?? Dang man, that's dangerous! You should be reported to the FAA!!

Yep, I'm just pointing out the silliness of this thread and the subject at hand; some of you are making mountains out of molehills here.
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Or maybe I should have posted it in green.
 
I never liked it. Not only is it an insult to plenty of people that don’t deserve it, it’s a small minded stereotyping of people that don’t necessarily fit, just because they did one thing that bothered you. I have no doubt you do something that bothers someone else just as much. That’s not to say there aren’t people out there that deserve it, but it’s used far too quickly and with little real understanding of the targets motives IMO.
 
Salty said:
I never liked it. Not only is it an insult to plenty of people that don’t deserve it, it’s a small minded stereotyping of people that don’t necessarily fit, just because they did one thing that bothered you. I have no doubt you do something that bothers someone else just as much. That’s not to say there aren’t people out there that deserve it, but it’s used far too quickly and with little real understanding of the targets motives IMO.
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a commentary that applies to a great many labels
 
When I was learning to fly in my 65 HP Luscombe, with instructor on board, a scenic ride giving Travel Air biplane did something similar, probably with paying passengers on board. When he got behind us (and it was much closer than 1/2 mile) my instructor said “my airplane, game on”, pitched up and the fun began. The Travel Air pilot didn’t know that my instructor had flown that very plane for many hundreds of hours and accordingly knew in detail how to out maneuver it with a clean, ‘modern’ 1946 plane… even if it had only a fraction of the power :cool: Good times. My instructional path to a private certificate was different than many other peoples, but I enjoyed it.

Nowadays I occasionally have somebody get on my tail and despite that ‘training’ I don’t turn into them with a wing over. My usual reaction is to see if I can lose them in level flight, then figure out what type they are with ADS-B so as to compare top speeds. My current plane is not particularly fast but from this I’ve learned it will outrun a Cherokee 180 but not a 235!
 
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FYI, tactical fighter formations can be more than a mile lateral separate and several thousand feet altitude.

In the A-10, in the low level arena, we flew the same altitude but laterally 3000 - 5000 feet. If a 4-ship, the second two we 5000 - 7000 feet back.

Formation was large enough to allow a T-39 fly through it. :D
 
unsafervguy said:
the environment is not the point, the point is, that .5 miles is not a close encounter, not in the FAA's mind, or pretty much anybody elses. point is, there are plenty of karens out there that love to call the FAA over pilots actions, we don't need to have pilots calling the FAA on other pilots unless there really is an issue.

domeinck, could not have been an RV, we never fly that far apart.
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unsafervguy said:
.5 mles is in no way close. nobody would ever consider .5 mile even loose formation. in rvsm airspace you have planes doing 500kts in opposite directions at .18 (1000 ft separation) as normal ops and half the time atc never even calls them. he violated no fars, what are you going to report, "hey, faa, this guy ****ed me off"?
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I get your point, but I don’t think Jets in the class A flight levels are a good comparison.
 
Coinneach said:
Had an unnerving encounter with another plane today. Saw him on ADS-B, my altitude and reciprocal heading, 12 o'clock. I diverted to the right. He followed me. I descended, he descended. I got visual on him, watched him pass close (.5NM according to the gadget) behind at my 8 o'clock, then crank it over and got on my tail. He stayed there for the next five minutes while I maintained heading and altitude, then wandered off. I was on CTAF of the nearest airport and never heard a call from him. TBF, I didn't raise hell on the CTAF either.

When I got home, I looked up his track on Flightaware. He'd been doing random turns (about half of them steep) and altitude changes for a good 45 minutes until he spotted me. His type was masked on ADS-B and all I could see was a basic low-wing silhouette, but his reg show a *much* faster plane than mine, so he had to have been throttled way back to keep waxing my tail, i.e. it was deliberate.

The plane is registered to an LLC, so it would be the work of about 2 minutes to look up his contact info and give him a polite ***-chewing about non-consensual formation flight. OTOH, no paint was swapped. Maybe he just wanted to ride a Cherokee's wake turbulence.

So what sayeth the membership? Do I need to develop more of a sense of humour? Does that guy need to be repeatedly whacked with a clue-by-four? Either? Neither? Both?
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Pinecone said:
FYI, tactical fighter formations can be more than a mile lateral separate and several thousand feet altitude.

In the A-10, in the low level arena, we flew the same altitude but laterally 3000 - 5000 feet. If a 4-ship, the second two we 5000 - 7000 feet back.

Formation was large enough to allow a T-39 fly through it. :D
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Is that a hypothetical T-39? Or is there a story here?
 
Navy formation: Any two Naval aircraft airborne simultaneously, anywhere in the world. . .I kid; a family member is a Naval aviator.
 
murphey said:
Sidenote: Can we please stop using the "karen" as a derogatory term? No one's name should be used like this, regardless of the situation.
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One of my nicknames has been used as a derogatory term all my life (although it's not generally capitalized when used in that manner). I never gave it a second thought, since the intent is usually clear from the context. I do have sympathy for people named Karen who may not have gotten used to it, however.

-Richard
 
pfarber said:
You can write a nasty gram but as asked above, what FAR was broken?

Unless you call the FSDO or a ASRS report no one is gonna care. Also, major Karen vibe
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I"m with the poster on this. If you want to clown around and play top gun with your friends, I don't care, but leave me out of it.
 
Careless and reckless casts a pretty wide net.

You should post the n number on here. Maybe he's a member.
 
Hmm, I'm generally too busy worrying about what's in front of me to worry about someone behind me, unless they are closing at an excessive rate on a collision course. Let it go, worry more about traffic ahead.
 
PaulS said:
Yeah, that sounds racist. But that's just me.
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It can't possibly be racist. The mods would never permit any sort of racist post on this forum, would they? You must be mistaken. If it truly were racist, I'm sure the management council would have taken action by now.
 
Half Fast said:
It can't possibly be racist. The mods would never permit any sort of racist post on this forum, would they? You must be mistaken. If it truly were racist, I'm sure the management council would have taken action by now.
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I doubt that moderating this forum is anyone's full time job.
 
MooneyDriver78 said:
Another reason to own a fast plane, let’s see if you can follow me at 180 mph.
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I can. :D

As far as the OP, I had an F16 do similar with me, only he got closer than 1/2 mile. Should I call the DOD and report?
 
Salty said:
You probably won’t get a lot of sympathy here. I had a thread discussing close calls and most here didn’t seem to give a carp about .5 miles
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Perhaps it wasn't the situation that no one gave a crap about. ;)
 
EdFred said:
I had an F16 do similar with me, only he got closer than 1/2 mile. Should I call the DOD and report?
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I was cruising along the NJ beach at 500' in my T-Craft once when I got bounced by a P-51. He roared by about 50' off my wingtip hauling ass, and I mean roared... even over my own engine noise I heard him before I saw him.

No idea who he was. Report him? Hell no, I wanted him to do it again!
 
Dana said:
I was cruising along the NJ beach at 500' in my T-Craft once when I got bounced by a P-51. He roared by about 50' off my wingtip hauling ***, and I mean roared... even over my own engine noise I heard him before I saw him.

No idea who he was. Report him? Hell no, I wanted him to do it again!
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We got buzzed by an F-22 on the way to the Daytona 24 this year. One passed directly in front of us, same altitude on a perpendicular course at about 2 miles away. His wingman was 3-5 miles in trail, co-altitude, and climbed to clear us by about 1,000' vertically. I pitched the RV-10 up to keep him in sight as he went overhead. He probably didn't hear me call "Fox 1"....
 
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