chris writes:

Aircraft can be incredibly hard to see, believe it or not.....

If they are hard to see 200 feet away, how am I supposed to find and maintain
visual separation with aircraft that are five miles away?

This is an aspect of simulation that I find amusing. Some simmers get nervous
if they cannot see traffic that's 15 miles away, even though everything within
a ten-mile radius has huge red letters flashing above it that indicate
aircraft type, call sign, and other stuff. I turn all the labeling off. If I
can't see the aircraft, I can't see it. If I can see it but it's just a dot,
there's no way that I can know the call sign or type. But at least that's a
lot more like real life. It is surprisingly rare that I can even see an
aircraft well enough to figure out the general type of airframe, and I figure
that if I were close enough to read the tail number off the plane for ATC in
real life, it would already be too late.

Fortunately, mathematics can help. If everyone flies around completely at
random, it's statistically wildly improbable that any aircraft will ever
collide. In fact, traffic patterns, airways, altitude restrictions, and
navaids actually increase the chances of a collision, rather than decreasing
them. And the more accurate navigation becomes, the greater the danger,
because you have aircraft aiming for waypoints with an accuracy of only a few
feet, which is comparable to the dimensions of the airplane and thus
guarantees a collision if they both arrive at the same waypoint at the same
time (and the same altitude, which is made more probable by conventional
altitude assignments).

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