Roper 35, traffic in your twelve o’clock, three miles, type and altitude unknown.” This ATC call got our immediate attention. We were blitzing along in a U.S. Air Force T-38 at 300 knots and about 3000 feet msl, southbound over the Sacramento Valley. The controller might just as well have said, “I hope you’re looking out the windscreen—you have about twelve seconds to hit or miss this guy.”
Clearing the air around us like two terrified pilots would clear—because we were two terrified pilots—we blasted along, bug-eyed, looking everywhere ahead, left and right—and passed a couple hundred feet just about right under a small single-engine airplane. We were close enough to see that the pilot clearly never saw us—he was looking straight ahead, not at us. He made no avoidance move. He may have gotten an ATC call advising him to look out for us. He may not have.
