12/14/2020
The near-midair Bill Cox describes in this article happened to me on one of my cross-country training flights in 2002, before TCAS and ADS-B became prolific in general aviation. I was taking off from Sedona (KSEZ) on 21, and someone was coming in for landing on 03. That's fairly standard for this uncontrolled airport since it sits in a bowl. I heard his radio call from five miles out, and perhaps he heard mine on takeoff, but only luck and a scant 20 feet or so kept us from colliding when I was climbing out and he was descending. My flight instructor had ducked down to retrieve a map from the floor and I was flying the low-wing PA-28 Cherokee, when all of a sudden a high-wing Cessna was HUGE in my windscreen and then gone. I gasped, but had no time for any evasive maneuver, and my flight instructor looked up and said, "What?"
A midair collision can happen so fast and unexpectedly, you could quite literally never know what hit you. Here’s how Bill Cox got lucky.