interesting moment yesterday on final

This sounds like misinformation.

What do you mean?


As far as looking down final, ...the base leg is a busy period where you're
rolling level, maintaining your decent, watching your airspeed, maybe adding
flaps, looking for your landing point, and clearing the final approach for
any other inbound. Lots of times, if you are not aware of an actual inbound,
that "look" is just cursory and short of a 747 with lights on, you'll miss
that traffic. Also, pilots do not always report the distances accurately.
Sounds like he may have initiated a standard rate 360 and called you on roll
out, which would be about 2 minutes later. But you state a 1 mile final, and
approx two minutes later you were 50agl, that's a long time for a no wind 1
mile final.

Good point about the look possibly being cursory. My guess is he
called my half way through the turn (which was why he couldn't see
me), which would be about right for a 1 minute 1 mile final at 65
knots.


But again, the events you describe sound pretty routine for after hour ops
at any airport under a B or C shelf. When I first learned to fly I actually
avoided non-towered fields because planes seemed to pop out of the strangest
places.
Places I know I just looked and were empty. ;-o