Flight Crew Commercial; Flight Crew Instrument; Flight Crew Flight Instructor
Flight Crew Last 90 Days 114; Flight Crew Total 1449; Flight Crew Type 154
Situational Awareness
Conflict NMAC
Flight Crew Took Evasive Action
Human Factors
Saw a lightsport looking plane out of periphery of my vision while punching in a button or two on GPS on my panel. Immediately pushed forward and rolled away in steep descending turn to the left; as I was already positioned level and about 100 feet left of a head-on alignment with the other aircraft. I was heads down for less than 6 seconds estimated by time of noticing other aircraft due to relative movement in my field of view that would not have been apparent further out in distance and time from the near-miss. Immediate recognition of need to deviate to left (rather than right) was made along with recognition that a collision would not result due to the immediate evasive action taken. The other aircraft did not take any evasive action and is therefore assumed to have been unaware of my presence. I looked towards aircraft as I rolled and kept eyes on aircraft as it passed by me towards my 5 o clock position while I was rolled in a 70 degree left bank. I then recovered to level flight and continued to climb to 6;300 pattern altitude at my destination airport. I had ADS-B out from a modern solid state transponder unit as well as ADS-B in capability; but I was not referencing ADS-B in on any device screen at the time of the near-miss. The situation may have been avoided in the difficult to see case of a head on convergence had I had my ipad or phone connected to my ADS-B over wifi and a method for monitoring the ADS-B situation with auditory alerts in my headset so that an alert of impending collision would have taken my attention away from a cockpit task and diverted my eyes outside to search for a collision waiting to happen. I was lucky that my field of vision included enough of the view in front of me in my periphery to permit my vision to inform me of the near-miss by the time the aircraft was less than 1;000 feet in front of me. Closure rate was estimated to be 170-190 knots taking both of our speeds into account; with 100 foot lateral separation and less than 30 feet vertical separation before evasive action was taken about 2 miles north of Boulder reservoir; coming southbound from Longmont; CO.
GA pilot reported an NMAC near LMO airport.