Separation... slightly off topic
 

can anyone check how close BA872 and FR2747 got to each other on 8th April. Would have been around 17:00 BST as BA 872 was approaching the hague

872 is LHR-KRK
the FR flight was from kaunas to STN

BA872 was at 37,000 feet.
FR2747 was descending from 36,000 feet and was at about 35,375 feet at the nearest point. It had been at 36,000 for a few minutes, after being at 38,000 feet from about 4 minutes prior to that.

So over 1,000 feet of separation.

ok thanks

Were you concerned or just interested in how close something looks from the window?

a bit of both

At their closest point there was approximately 1.5 miles of horizontal separation from what I can see.

BA872 at 37,000 feet.
FR2747 at 35,225 feet.

How did you find that out? I've put my "impressed" lipstick on. Can you see it?

Seriously I'm intrigued.

Flight Radar 24 replay.

https://www.flightradar24.com/2017-0...x/52.64,7.07/7

This starts at 1540 UTC. The RYR comes in from the Twente Area, callsign RYR82QE. The BAW comes from the left, BAW872.

Him Indoors has that on both Iphone and Ipad - I did not know that you could do that.

You just became a Mucci de l'expertise des Apps henceforth!

An award not lightly conferred airprox. You are truly honoured. Hail airprox

My flight radar has the altitude locked, I can see the two aircraft

From the window the FR flight seemed pretty close (which at about 1700 feet it was), the horizontal separation of 1.5 miles comes as a surprise, it did not look 8km away!! KRK airport is 8km from my apartment and the FR aircraft looked considerably closer!

Congratulations on the MUCCI airprox, the first of 2017?

1.5 miles is 2.4km.

ha oops

still didn't look a mile and a half away!

Thanks very much for the honours, perhaps the Mucci should go to nux though as he got there first?

In this piece of airspace we need either 1000ft vertically or 5NM laterally (for single aircraft that are approved for reduced vertical separation). There's no need for both, so as long as the aircraft are 1000ft apart they can pass right by each other which really does look very close, particularly head on!

The RYR was going to STN so needed to be descended to FL280 (28,000ft amsl) by the border between the NL and UK ATC centers, so with the BAW going the other way at FL370 the controller descended the RYR to 360 to go below when it was still 5 mins or so away so that the RYR could then have an unhindered descent to the exit level. The controller could have turned the aircraft so that they would have passed more than 5NM apart and then the RYR could have stayed at their cruise level and descended through your level, in which case you wouldn't have seen them so well as they would have been much futher away.

If we think there is going to be something interesting to see then we often give pilots a heads up so they can get their cameras out, and then we have a dedicated e-mail address for them to send us the pics which is always interesting!