Hetch wrote:Hi Antoine,
I am also a prospective DA40 xls buyer. Regarding your advice to get active traffic, wouldn't complying with the ADS-B requirements fulfill the same objective? Thus making the plane just as safe as one with active traffic monitoring? You can guess why I am asking lol
Thank you.
In the US, this will come to be mostly true in about 3 years. Less so today. Qualifiers for today's situation:
1. You need some form of ADS-B IN to detect such traffic. As a practical matter, dual-band IN is a must.
2. Right now most aircraft are not ADS-B mandate compliant, so you mostly see traffic responding to interrogation picked up by ground radar and relayed to the ADS-B infrastructure.
3. Today, to be able to see non-ADS-B traffic you need to be in range of at least one of the ADS-B towers. Right now this is most, but not all, US airspace above a few hundred feet AGL. In some spots it's available all the way to the surface.
In 2020:
1. 1 (above) still applies.
2. If one assumes 100% conformity to regulations. You would see every bit of traffic with ADS-B that you would see with TCAS.
3. 100% regulation conformance is a big assumption. But the percentage of willfully non-conforming aircraft you'd encounter that would instead have their transponders operating is an interesting question. So how much better TCAS would be is debatable.
Outside the US, the state of usefulness of ADS-B varies widely, since large percentages of aircraft may not be subject to ADS-B requirements at all.
In any case you will never see, today or in any future scenario, aircraft without an operating transponder or ADS-B OUT system, whether legally or illegally, with either TCAS or ADS-B IN.