AOPA asked me to contact my rep about the Hudson corridor. I did, but I don’t think it addresses the root cause of the problem. My two cents below.

I am writing in support of the recommended changes to the airspace over New York City. It is a temporary solution.

The real reason for most mid-air collisions is the FAA’s failure to develop an effective reliable cost effective collision avoidance system (CAS).

You will not read this in any accident report. The fox is investigating the case of the missing chickens.

In reality designing and implementing a good CAS would be orders of magnitude simpler than designing and implementing a cell phone network that can connect people all over the world in real time. Consider a modern cell phone. It contains a microprocessor, memory, battery, transmitter, receiver, GPS chip, microphone, and visual display.

The only remaining requirement is the application specific software. The device would transmit the aircraft’s position and velocity vectors, six pieces of data, in a short semi random burst. Nearby aircraft would receive this data with a separate receiver and display it.

Would the Hudson mid-air have occurred if both pilots had the same information on their instrument panel that the controllers had on their screen, (actually much more accurate and up to date information)? Would the collision have happened if both pilots had audible and visual warnings with a countdown timer ticking off the seconds remaining to collision?

On the display, each aircraft symbol would coast along its velocity vector between transmissions, and the transmission rate would vary as needed to insure accuracy even with an occasional overlap of transmissions. That is, when an aircraft is flying straight at a constant speed, the transmissions would be several seconds apart without affecting accuracy. When the plane is changing direction or speed the time between transmissions would be less.

By using cell phone technology the equipment would be so small and inexpensive that sky divers, ultra light aircraft, sailplanes, airport vehicles and unmanned aircraft could be equipped. A single conveniently mounted transmitter could be programmed to transmit the coordinates of several points on tall towers, buildings, tethered balloons, bridges and cables, thus protecting aircraft operating in poor visibility.

With a separate transmitter and receiver on each aircraft, people would be protected in the event of a single failure. If your transmitter fails you will still be able to electronically see and avoid the other aircraft around you; if your receiver fails they will still see and avoid you.

For many years the FAA has been working on a very expensive Rube Goldberg system called ADSB to perform a few of these functions. It will be mandatory in 2020. The advantages of low cost, light weight, reliability, added features ease of mass production and capability of rapid development and deployment makes this approach far superior.