Nearest near-miss?

The Transponder chatter on other threads got me to thinking about who’s got the closest near-miss? Thought I’d kick it off with my incident over 40 years ago. I was flying my homebuilt wooden sailplane over Mono Lake, Ca. Cursing south at 16000’ and 60 knots when I spotted a 4 engine jet below and to my left. Our flight paths were going to intersect, but he was a good 500 feet below me. Two seconds later it became crystal clear that it wasn’t a 4 engine jet, it was a 4 pod jet with 8 engines and the B-52 was climbing fast! Too late for me to maneuver,I’m doing 60 and he’s doing maybe 360, and I didn’t want to throw my belly to him. I just sat there thinking I had a front row seat to my demise! As he passed just under my nose, I could clearly see the copilot reading his checklist! I’m sure they never saw me, but I sure as hell saw them! I figured the wake turbulence was going to tear my little Duster to bits, so I tightened up my parachute straps. Nothing! Guess the turbulence all went below and behind him. How far can you see a man reading a book? I’ll lay claim at 50 Feet!
Let’s hear your story,
JJ

OK, prior to transponders in gliders, I was flying over South Park, CO
at the highest legal altitude.Â* A Citation jet heading for Buena Vista
descended over me passing just in front.Â* I recall clearly his wheels in
the gear wells.Â* Had I thought of it at the time, I probably could have
read the brand name on the tires.Â* Very unsettling.Â* Still it was quite
some time before I installed a Trig 22.Â* It had not been invented at the
time of my close encounter.

On 5/10/2019 10:47 AM, wrote:
The Transponder chatter on other threads got me to thinking about who’s got the closest near-miss? Thought I’d kick it off with my incident over 40 years ago. I was flying my homebuilt wooden sailplane over Mono Lake, Ca. Cursing south at 16000’ and 60 knots when I spotted a 4 engine jet below and to my left. Our flight paths were going to intersect, but he was a good 500 feet below me. Two seconds later it became crystal clear that it wasn’t a 4 engine jet, it was a 4 pod jet with 8 engines and the B-52 was climbing fast! Too late for me to maneuver,I’m doing 60 and he’s doing maybe 360, and I didn’t want to throw my belly to him. I just sat there thinking I had a front row seat to my demise! As he passed just under my nose, I could clearly see the copilot reading his checklist! I’m sure they never saw me, but I sure as hell saw them! I figured the wake turbulence was going to tear my little Duster to bits, so I tightened up my parachute straps. Nothing! Guess the turbulence all went below and behind him. How far can you see a man reading a book? I’ll lay claim at 50 Feet!
Let’s hear your story,
JJ

--
Dan, 5J

Me in a DG-303 10+ years ago thermalling a handful of miles south of the Panoche VOR in California. An area of convergence along the local low-ranges that causes some great soaring. Lots of higher-level traffic come in over that VOR heading into KJSC but normally not a lot of lower level stuff.

It's scattered clouds and I'm getting up near cloudbase at 6?k feet or so. As I come around a turn I see a C150/C152 cutting through my thermal circle.. 100' or so away. Going the opposite way to me. Two POB, I think I can make out an instrument hood on the pilot. I expect it is a training flight flight inbound to the VOR. I was looking and had not seen the Cessna at all. How do you not see a lumbering C150? The background pattern of mottled clouds helped make that hard. Who knows how well the instructor was looking out, or monitoring the student.

My DG-303 glider already had a transponder, that incident lead me to get a Zaon PCAS.

Years later I in the Mendocino mountains in Northern CA I had a fire bomber (P2 Neptune ?) fly close to my thermal circle. It was not working any local fires (we are very careful with Fire TFRs and traffic when they are live), it was just transiting the area, nowhere near as close as the C152 I had found the firebomber with a scan after the Xaon went off and watched it pass by. OK a Neptune is a lot larger than a C150 but the Zaon working exactly like I hoped it would was impressive. BTW that Neptune flew right though the start gate area for local contests... had it been a busy day things could have been worse.

And close in different ways...

I was flying out of Minden the day of the ASG-29 (with transponder turned off) / Hawker midair. We were coming back from the north, so not close to the middair, but landed our Duo Discus as the lead search helicopter was leaving to look for the glider pilot. We checked but nothing we could do to help and my grim expectation was the glider pilot was dead--utterly amazing that he survived. That incident and some of the confused reposes to it about UAT technology got me more interested in the technical aspects of transponders, ADS-B and FLARM.

Then there was the day I was going to fly with Hal Chouinard but I could not make it so Hal went to a different glider port, and Hal and Sean Boylan were killed in a glider-towplane middair. We were talking about it at that time, but PowerFLARM became available in the USA some time after that fatal mid-air.

There are many more close encounters and near middair collisions. Be safe out there.

On Friday, May 10, 2019 at 12:07:25 PM UTC-7, Dan Marotta wrote:
OK, prior to transponders in gliders, I was flying over South Park, CO
at the highest legal altitude.Â* A Citation jet heading for Buena Vista
descended over me passing just in front.Â* I recall clearly his wheels in
the gear wells.Â* Had I thought of it at the time, I probably could have
read the brand name on the tires.Â* Very unsettling.Â* Still it was quite
some time before I installed a Trig 22.Â* It had not been invented at the
time of my close encounter.

On 5/10/2019 10:47 AM, wrote:
The Transponder chatter on other threads got me to thinking about who’s got the closest near-miss? Thought I’d kick it off with my incident over 40 years ago. I was flying my homebuilt wooden sailplane over Mono Lake, Ca. Cursing south at 16000’ and 60 knots when I spotted a 4 engine jet below and to my left. Our flight paths were going to intersect, but he was a good 500 feet below me. Two seconds later it became crystal clear that it wasn’t a 4 engine jet, it was a 4 pod jet with 8 engines and the B-52 was climbing fast! Too late for me to maneuver,I’m doing 60 and he’s doing maybe 360, and I didn’t want to throw my belly to him. I just sat there thinking I had a front row seat to my demise! As he passed just under my nose, I could clearly see the copilot reading his checklist! I’m sure they never saw me, but I sure as hell saw them! I figured the wake turbulence was going to tear my little Duster to bits, so I tightened up my parachute straps. Nothing! Guess the turbulence all went below and behind him. How far can you see a man reading a book? I’ll lay claim at 50 Feet!
Let’s hear your story,
JJ

--
Dan, 5J

When I had less than 10 hours after getting my private pilot rating flying a C-152 into Panama City, landed in the wrong runway, the wrong way and there was a citation trying to take off on the other side of the runway. My "copilot" , another low-time pilot, took over and moved the plane of the runway to the grass... after i apologized to the citation he said they had us in TCAS ...

And on the other side of that coin...

When I was a First Officer/Instructor Engineer with Braniff back in
1979/80, we were on the second to last leg home from Denver (Stapleton)
to Colorado Springs and then back to Dallas.Â* Our flight clearance was
to fly down the front range at 11,000 feet and I recall the Captain
saying:Â* "Let's see how fast this baby will go." I did not know about
gliders back then but we made 350 KIAS through an area that I later flew
a lot in gliders.Â* I hope there were no gliders about at the time.Â* A
727 would have been very large and loud at max power from the
perspective of a glider.

On 5/10/2019 1:07 PM, Dan Marotta wrote:
OK, prior to transponders in gliders, I was flying over South Park, CO
at the highest legal altitude.Â* A Citation jet heading for Buena Vista
descended over me passing just in front.Â* I recall clearly his wheels
in the gear wells.Â* Had I thought of it at the time, I probably could
have read the brand name on the tires.Â* Very unsettling.Â* Still it was
quite some time before I installed a Trig 22.Â* It had not been
invented at the time of my close encounter.

On 5/10/2019 10:47 AM, wrote:
The Transponder chatter on other threads got me to thinking about
who’s got the closest near-miss? Thought I’d kick it off with my
incident over 40 years ago. I was flying my homebuilt wooden
sailplane over Mono Lake, Ca. Cursing south at 16000’ and 60 knots
when I spotted a 4 engine jet below and to my left. Our flight paths
were going to intersect, but he was a good 500 feet below me. Two
seconds later it became crystal clear that it wasn’t a 4 engine jet,
it was a 4 pod jet with 8 engines and the B-52 was climbing fast! Too
late for me to maneuver,I’m doing 60 and he’s doing maybe 360, and I
didn’t want to throw my belly to him. I just sat there thinking I had
a front row seat to my demise! As he passed just under my nose, I
could clearly see the copilot reading his checklist! I’m sure they
never saw me, but I sure as hell saw them! I figured the wake
turbulence was going to tear my little Duster to bits, so I tightened
up my parachute straps. Nothing! Guess the turbulence all went below
and behind him.Â* How far can you see a man reading a book? I’ll lay
claim at 50 Feet!
Let’s hear your story,
JJ


--
Dan, 5J

Ridge soaring in the French Alps (local to the airfield, waiting for an
improvement in the weather) with a very experienced pupil handling. He
started to turn right; I automatically glanced right, Flarm beeped, I
glanced down and straight back up to find the daylight blocked out by the
underside of X's glider in what appeared to be 60 degrees of bank,
overtaking us and climbing.
Later I discussed it with X on the ground: he had spotted us on his "Flarm

Radar" moving map and thought he would nip over and say hello!
Unannounced, he zoomed from behind and below us, "knowing" that we
"would not do anything stupid" because (he assumed) we would know he
was there. But the first that we knew was that beep, perhaps 2 seconds
before impact by an aircraft that we could not have seen (behind and
below) - but for X's quick evasive reaction.
Interestingly, X explained to me that I shouldn't rely solely on Flarm for

collision avoidance!! Draw your own conclusions!
J.

I was flying out of Sterling Mass. We found some wave about 5 miles south of an inbound to Boston airway. At around 13k we could see the inbound traffic to our north. I was next to another glider when I saw him do a mild wingover to the left. Thinking, gee, you don't usually see gliders do acrobatics in wave. I watched him jog to the left when and I turned my gaze back to the west, I was looking right down two engines attached to an RJ. It looked like I might be seeing a bit of the bottom of the fuselage, so I pushed over, and literally closed my eyes. I never heard them, but there could not have been much room. After i gathered my thoughts, I called Boston Center to tell them gliders were flying between 9 and 14,000 ft. The rather terse reply was "We Know"...

I went home and bought a pcas. Now I fly with a transponder and ADS-B out.

Overtaken by another glider in a pre-start thermal. His belly over my canopy about ten feet. Flight logs confirm.

T8

The two biggest blind spots are below and in front of you or above and behind you. My closest is the one I didn’t see but was told about it by a rather reputable pilot after the fact. I was flying along in a Nimbus 3 early on a 500 mile task out of Minden during the Open class nationals. We all started pretty much at the same time since it was such along task. This was before we carried transponders, had Flarm, or any of that good stuff. Anyway I zoom up in a thermal and I hear that my tail missed the guy directly behind me by about three feet! He has a cool head and isn’t known to exaggerate.

Coming out of my vortex / downburst encounter on final over a gravel pit, I climbed to clear a topsoil pile. My cogitations about where to put the glider were rudely disrupted by seeing the braid of the power cable that I cleared by 5' or so.

Only my equanimity was damaged