An aircraft traffic alert system that minimizes false alarms and unnecessary alerts by automatically adjusting the sensitivity of the system based on proximity to an airport. The system also can use information from a flight management system (FMS) or GPS navigation system (GNS) to only adjust the sensitivity near a destination airport and to suppress potential alerts for possible collisions with other aircraft that will be moot based on planned course changes of the subject aircraft. The system also can suppress alerts related to another aircraft when the other aircraft is landing on a parallel runway to the runway on which the subject aircraft is landing. The system may use multiple sensitivity levels based on different airspace classes, each class being associated with a different sensitivity level.