Did I witness a near miss?

[colin8651]

I was outside of my home tonight and around 5:49PM and I witnessed what looked to be two aircraft come within a few thousand feet of each other while making a turn. An aircraft similar to a Gulfstream G650 was making a final turn for landing above Byram CT going to Westchester airport (HPN). At the same time, an aircraft of what appeared to be an A320 reticently taken off from LaGuardia (LGA) making a delayed turn to the East after takeoff. I know the human brain can easily preserve two aircraft in the sky being close to each other while still being a great distance apart, but the aircraft were in the 3 to 4 thousand feet area and I could see them clear as day.
Shortly thereafter I came to FlightTrader24 to rewind the feed and see if I could identify the aircraft and verify their distance apart from one another, but the recorded feed in my area seems to be a little blinky and I wasn't able to identify the flight numbers. Does the FAA record near miss events and make them publicly available? I would like to see if I was seeing an illusion or if I did indeed whiteness two aircraft coming that close to each other.

[speedbird1960]

Trying to track down those two Aircraft would be difficult, the best thing to do is check this website as it has regular updates of incidents.

http://avherald.com/

[fungus]

I was outside of my home tonight and around 5:49PM and I witnessed what looked to be two aircraft come within a few thousand feet of each other while making a turn. An aircraft similar to a Gulfstream G650 was making a final turn for landing above Byram CT going to Westchester airport (HPN). At the same time, an aircraft of what appeared to be an A320 reticently taken off from LaGuardia (LGA) making a delayed turn to the East after takeoff. I know the human brain can easily preserve two aircraft in the sky being close to each other while still being a great distance apart, but the aircraft were in the 3 to 4 thousand feet area and I could see them clear as day.
Shortly thereafter I came to FlightTrader24 to rewind the feed and see if I could identify the aircraft and verify their distance apart from one another, but the recorded feed in my area seems to be a little blinky and I wasn't able to identify the flight numbers. Does the FAA record near miss events and make them publicly available? I would like to see if I was seeing an illusion or if I did indeed whiteness two aircraft coming that close to each other.

Colin
This may help you to understand the minimum separations required for aircraft under various circumstances;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_%28air_traffic_control%29

Obviously it cant be relied upon for actual navigation but it gives you a pretty good idea. There are also some minor differences (particularly in airspace terms) from country to country. From this information you may be able to determine if you think a 'conflict' occured (see above article) as it's difficult to judge from your post. As has been said, the Avherald is a good source of accident/incident information, as is this site: http://aviation-safety.net/index.php. In the USA I believe the NTSB in general do the actual investigation. See http://www.ntsb.gov/ and the tab on the left 'Submit a TCAS Notification' is to be used for reporting the exact type of incident you've identified (although I wouldnt recommend using it, as I'd think it's more for pilots). They also have an accident database which includes an FAA 'incident' database under the heading 'Aviation Accident Database' (under the pic at the top of the page) dating back to 1978.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Gregg