Many moons ago (too many to count) I was flying as a flight engineer on a USCG PBY-5A. We were based at Corpus Christi NAS. The Navy had several smaller air stations in the near vicinity each with its’ own tower and control. Our aircraft was practicing ground-controlled approaches to the ground and our pilots were “under the hood”. We were being controlled by NAS corpus Christi.
The sky was overcast and although visibility to the ground was good horizontal visibility was not so good. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted an aircraft that was at our same altitude and crossing our path at about 90-degrees from the left. I contacted the pilots but they did not respond as to lose contact with the ground for several seconds required that they break away from the landing path and make a go-around. I contacted the pilots several times more as the aircraft came closer. Finally, I hit command override and told the pilots that the aircraft was coming closer. They made some unintelligible comment and just then the GCA that was controlling our landing path saw the same aircraft on their screens and the GCA controlling the other aircraft (a JRB Beech D-18) saw us on their screens. Pandemonium ensued as our respective GCA controllers told us and the other pilot who was also under the hood to pull up and or dive. We missed each other by about 500 feet.
