My closest near collisions have all been in the airport environment and both the other aircraft and I were under control of the tower. In one case, September of 2003 out of Burbank, tower put a United Airlines MD 80 heading to Dallas, and me (in an MD520 N) , on a collision course at about 200 ft AGL. An amazing story all told, but bottom line, buy the safety devices you can, but... We both filed NASA reports and the guy at NASA actually called me and said this is the most amazing story he had seen, then told me he was not supposed to do this, he offered me the phone number of the United pilot. Interesting how both the United pilot and I had a little bit different perspective of the same event. If someone can find the incident report I would love to read it. Burbank tower actually tracked me down and apologized.

On Wednesday, September 27, 2017 at 11:55:43 AM UTC-7, John Carlyle wrote:
I've been in 3 close calls with big iron while flying my glider inside the mode C veils N of PHL and also W of EWR. In all 3 cases I'm convinced that my Trig TT21 was a lifesaver. All occurred at about 6,000 MSL.