SkyWest Airlines said on Sunday that one of its passenger jets had aborted a landing in North Dakota last week because another aircraft was in its flight path.
After the SkyWest plane landed safely on Friday, the pilot told passengers that he had made an “aggressive maneuver” to avoid hitting a military aircraft, according to a recording of his remarks that a passenger made and shared with The New York Times.
The passenger, Monica Green, said in an interview that she was sitting near the front of SkyWest Flight 3788 from Minneapolis to Minot, N.D., when she felt the plane swerve “harshly” to the right near the end of the trip. The turn was so sharp that she found herself looking out the window, not at the sky, but at the cornfields below, she said.
“My plane keeps circling and not landing,” she texted her husband at the time, according to a screenshot of their conversation. After the plane eventually landed at Minot International Airport, she said, the pilot came into the cabin and told the passengers that he had turned to avoid hitting a military aircraft. She said the mood felt eerily calm.
“Sorry about the aggressive maneuver,” a man she said was the pilot can be heard saying in the video recording she made from her seat. “It caught me by surprise. This is not normal at all.”
The air traffic control tower at the airport does not have radar, the pilot says in the video, but a nearby United States Air Force base does. “I don’t know why they didn’t give us a heads up,” he says. “Because the Air Force base does have radar, and nobody said, ‘Hey, there’s also a B-52 in the pattern.’”
The Air Force did not respond to multiple requests for comment overnight. An Air Force spokesperson told ABC News and other news outlets that it was looking into reports about “commercial and Air Force aircraft operating in airspace around Minot International Airport.”
The Minot Air Force Base, which is less than 15 miles north of the airport, did not respond to a request for comment. It is also close to the North Dakota State Fair, an event that began on Friday and featured B-52 bomber flyovers.
Flight records show that a B-52 was in the air around Minot for part of the time that Flight 3788 was traveling to the area from Minneapolis.
SkyWest said in a brief statement late Sunday that Flight 3788 had “performed a go-around when another aircraft became visible” in its flight path as it tried to land at the Minot airport on Friday. SkyWest said that it was investigating what had happened. It did not say how close the two planes had come to each other and did not respond to follow-up questions.
A go‐around is a safety procedure in which a plane aborts a landing procedure.
The plane was a type of Embraer jet that typically has between 76 and 88 seats. Ms. Green estimated that there were about 60 people on board.
The Federal Aviation Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Monday morning.
SkyWest is based in Utah and operates flights for Delta and other major carriers across the United States; Flight 3788 is a Delta codeshare. Its Delta flights include daily flights from Detroit, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City. Delta referred questions about the episode to SkyWest.
After the midair scare, Ms. Green, a merchandise manager who lives in Texas, received an email from Delta saying that it was “fully supporting a review of what occurred,” according to a screenshot of the email.
Ms. Green, who flew to Minot because one of her artists was playing at the state fair, said in a phone interview early Monday that she still felt shaken up and confused about what had happened. She said it seemed particularly odd that the planes had nearly collided in “wide open sky.”
“I haven’t had time to think about what could have happened if this pilot hadn’t made this decision,” she said.
Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world.
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