Transport Canada survey on near mid air collisions.

[Ryan Dewsbury]

Transport Canada has an electronic conspiquity working group and they are doing a survey on near misses.

https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/M5CRV5V?lang=en

Only a handful of our aircraft have some form of electronic conspiquity ie FLARM.

[Dave Bax]

Re the above post,
see the full SAC request below, received by me today, sent to all Ontario gliding club Presidents:
Note if you fill in an incident, our airfield is CPC3

Hi,
Scott McMaster, Chairman of the SAC Airspace Committee,
has asked me to forward the following information to be shared with your club members.
The instructions are also posted to the SAC forum.

SAC kindly requests your participation in a ~7-20-minute voluntary and anonymous survey that Transport Canada is conducting on the topic of near mid-air collision.

This survey was developed by Electronic Conspicuity Working Group (ECWG), of which SAC (along with other aviation associations and general aviation stakeholders) is a member. The objective is to gather information from pilots flying in Canada about the frequency of airborne close encounters between two aircraft (or airspace users) which felt like a near mid-air collision.

The survey will be open until January 15th, 2026, and can be accessed on the link below:

· English: https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/M5CRV5V?lang=en
· French: https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/M5CRV5V?lang=fr

Note: If you complete the survey as a ‘test’, please enter the word “test” in the final question (which is a text box asking for other info) – this will allow it to easily be excluded.

Any questions feel free to contact me (scott@mcmaster.ca)

Best,

James Wood
SOSA Gliding Club

[Alex Upchurch]

Only a handful of our aircraft have some form of electronic conspiquity ie FLARM.

Do our towplanes all have transponders?

[Doug Carman]

Our towplanes do not have transponders. They are of no use for collision avoidance in any case. Only Toronto terminal radar could see them and possibly do anything about it. They would have to be altitude recording transponders, and the aircraft would have to be in contact with Toronto terminal radio.

The most likely times for close encounters would be in the circuit and in thermals. In both cases the warning from a system like Flarm would come at an awkward time, when finding the conflict and avoiding it could pose a greater threat than continuing to follow correct procedures and do a proper lookout.

I'm not saying things like Flarm may not be helpful, but proper procedure and lookout will mitigate before the Flarm even goes off.

[Ryan Dewsbury]

Do our towplanes all have transponders?

As Doug pointed out they do not have transponders. LTX has a portable FLARM unit.

Something that has changed in the last few years that will really affect electronic conspiquity is the network of UAT towers run by https://cifib.ca/ I happen to be one of the founders of this service. Since cifib does not have access to mode-c traffic data we made the decision to encode all the not ADS-B traffic that we can. What this means is that if an aircraft is flying with FLARM, OGN, or NemoScout they will rebroadcast as a traffic target for anyone listening for ADS-B traffic.

We happen to be in between two cifib stations (Hanover and Brampton) and we have a local OGN receiver. So any of our FLARM gliders will be visible as ADS-B targets to anyone in range of those stations.

Where this helps us is when someone flys though they will at least have some idea that we are flying when they see those targets.