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Sure I‘d like to explain my assertion...
Except for on published routings, namely SIDs and STARs (and approaches of course) in practice you won’t see IFR traffic inside the lowered E airspace parts in Germany. The reason is quite simple: Since no radar vectoring or IFR pickups are allowed below the MVAs starting at quite high altitudes or levels here in Germany (for those interested ENR 6-13 of the MilAIP might be a good starting point) you would have to cancel IFR to fly a direct-to below MVA for instance. Take my example of the lowered EDDL „E“ airspace south of EDLD for instance. It has never been used by ATC - but the higher „E“ airspace segments are used intensively for night arrivals into EDDL down to 3000‘ MSL...
Tim, please understand that „E“ airspace here isn‘t an additional element around some IFR airports leaving the rest as „G“ like in other European countries which justifies generation of warnings - it‘s all over Germany as one huge flat airspace between 2500‘ AGL and (mostly) FL100. Only where depicted on the ICAO charts its lower limits are pulled down to 1000‘ AGL - that‘s it. So if the program generates a popup saying „you just left „E“ airspace of XY“ that‘s simply wrong when you‘re flying at altitudes where there might be IFR traffic like in the example above. That‘s why people keep asking you to disable that function-it‘s misleading and blocks parts of the screen for its popup menues but provides no safety at all.
On the other hand we do see some FAFs inside E airspace where there are no extending C or D airspaces above the CTR, primarily at regional airports like EDDE and at altitudes of mostly around 2.5-3000‘ AAL. Since arrivals are vectored to those FAFs they seem to be a hotspot for near-misses between IFR and VFR traffic. That‘s where you‘ll find IFR traffic inside „E“ airspace in Germany.
Our suggestion was to mark these FAFs on the ICAO charts for awareness. However this was rejected for reasons unknown to me... Maybe SkyDemon could show them as an option in the future?
Currently we‘re talking about things like TMZ-H around RMZ protected airfields with the stakeholders. On the other hand collision avoidance cannot be granted by separation of airflows only since that leads to condensed VFR traffic around the edges of protected airspaces leaving a higher risk to those pilots flying uncontrolled (see your fantastic heatmap of traffic flows around London for instance).
In the end the only solution will be to SEE, BE SEEN AND AVOID - and this can only be achieved by implementing an electronic collision avoidance system inter-compatible between all users inside a specific airspace - starting with a glider, also an SEP and up to airliner traffic.
We‘re testing several solutions in practical flight tests around the research airport of Aachen as we speak although Covid-19 has slowed us down significantly. And since results are not yet validated I can‘t talk about it in public.
However we‘re using SkyDemon also-and it helps a lot in reducing the collision risk by displaying other traffic through various sources like the well-known AirTraffic module and others but mostly generating spoken traffic alerts via Bluetooth! This definitely shows an effect and we will evaluate this further.
Best, Björn
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