Trust and Faith in the Feds?- Off-shoot from EAA/FAA Agreement

[Jim Rosenow]

The feds damn near killed me the other day (venting in progress....clear!!)

Taking off from our home field in the R182. Monitored 122.8 and made all the proper calls...nobody else on the freq. Called CAK for flight following just above 2000 feet, and the first thing they said was 'We're glad to hear you, we were worried' (paraphrased, not quoted).

Our response was basically, 'Huh?'. They explained that while we were climbing thru 2000 feet, our target merged with another a/c at the same altitude that was not talking to them (not required to, by the way). We never saw the other a/c. How am I putting this near-miss on the feds?

We purchased both a Garmin 796 and an Android tablet to put on our yokes that display the traffic thru our GDL39 (process known as passive ADSB). According to the Garmin folks we talked to after the incident, the feds have limited the ADSB service that would have allowed us to see the traffic, so only those a/c that have active ADSB-out can see it. Instead of seeing what CAK saw on their own scopes and avoiding the conflict, we were fat, dumb, happy, and almost died. I've been told unoffically the FAA did this to urge early compliance with the 2020 adsb-out mandate. What they have actually done is drastically reduce the safety of everyone who flies.

To be specific..I am not bashing FAA employees in general. The guys at CAK are friends..a couple even flip pancakes with us at our local fly-in. I'm bashing an asinine sytem that could easily have made me dead...I take exception to that. So...I'm not big on FAA trust and faith right now. Oh...how's this for irony...we were flying over to talk to the dealer about why we weren't seeing traffic. :-)

End of rant...thanks for listening!

Jim