I've had a number of flights as a pilot when I wished I was on the ground and not in the air, but they all occurred in light aircraft and involved landings in winds / crosswinds which were out of limits (they were OK when I took off - honest). However the closest to death I ever came to in a military aircraft happened during a Boscombe airdrop trial. A new system for dropping RIBs required that the extractor parachute should lower the platform slow enough that it didn't get damaged as it hit the water. The PT were fed up with repairing the previous system.
The designer of the new system, with eyes on foreign sales, had decided to use the American G12 parachute both for the load and in a reefed form as the extractor. The first time we dropped the system the G12 extractor decided to de-reef itself with the result that the boat exited the Herc at warp speed and when it separated from the platform the RIB went UP with the bow out of sight hidden by the Herc's tail, I thought it had taken the duck's bill with it, it hadn't.
As boat drops were an expensive logistic nightmare it was decided that an MSP could be adapted so that development work could continue closer to Boscombe. Reassured by the parachute manufacturer that the de-reefing couldn't happen again we head off to Larkhill for the drop. Watching the extractor leave the aircraft it was almost in slow motion that I saw the reefing fail yet again. What wasn't slow motion was the exit speed of the MSP which was so fast that it did the magician's table cloth trick by exiting whilst leaving the recovery parachutes hanging in the air still in the cabin. With the G12 (sky anchor) extractor parachute still attached to the MSP now well clear of the aircraft the recovery parachutes landed on the cabin floor and stayed there whilst paying out the risers and when they came taught the snatch was such that parachute bags shot over the ramp leaving the parachute canopy behind. The tangle of parachute rigging lines and canopies slowly rolled down the ramp and finally off. Leaving me arguing with the Loadie over what we had just seen.
Being a Boscombe trial there were many cameras fitted to the Herc covering the drop and it was the following day when we sat down to view the film, shot at high speed so we viewed the action in slow motion, that we realised just how close to disaster we had been. If any of that nylon from the recovery parachutes had snagged on the roller floor........... I still shiver when I show people that film.