On 04 February 1965 I was in the right hand seat of Mrs Windsor's Argosy XR138. My captain, in the left seat, was doing his monthly training and was at the time, heads down on instruments flying an NDB hold (left hand) at the 'BO' NDB for Benson about to commence the approach.
The weather was CAVOK. As he turned off the end of the downwind leg of the hold on to the final approach course, he realised that he had turned too tightly and so he rolled the wings level to make an attack on to the ideal bearing.
It was at that moment that my world went into slow motion. I obviously couldn't see into the turn from the right seat but I suddenly had a windscreen full of BOAC VC-10 moving left to right. I grabbed control and tried to go down and right but everything had gone into very slow motion. It was like every second took an hour.
We just missed.
I saw the first officer in the VC-10 and I watched every single window in slow motion go past me. For some reason or another I do not remember seeing the wingtip.
To me, the most surreal part was watching the slightly black trail of the VC-10 engines disappearing into the distance without so much of a single degree of a heading change. They had simply not seen us.
Needless to say, we gave up what we were supposed to be doing and landed and fairly promptly, went down to the Farmers Man in Benson village for a quick nervous breakdown.
A couple of weeks later, I was called by a Wg Cdr in Flight Safety at MOD and he wanted to know how I knew that the VC-10 concerned was G-ARVH. I told him that I had read it off the tail-bullet. "Bloody Hell" said he "you must have been close!"
It transpired that the VC-10 was on its way from Wisley to Bedford to do some blind landing trials and they had decided to go VFR at 3,000 feet via Woodley and they admitted afterwards that they had disgegarded military holding patterns for Benson, to them, Benson was simply an ATZ.
I dreamed about the encounter for quite a while.
I therefore find it quite pathetic to find fellow private pilots (I presume) arguing about the semantics of what they think an ATC unit actually said to them which so upset their afternoon bimble when THEY KNOW THEIR RIGHTS!
For God's sake people, communicate with one another. It is quite amazing what you can achieve if you are nice to each other.
It is so much better than waking up in the middle of the night in a muck sweat trying to work out why you are still alive despite others.