A flight returned to Omaha shortly after takeoff on Monday evening when the pilots mistakenly thought someone might be trying to break into the cockpit.
American Airlines Flight 6469, operated by SkyWest, took off from Eppley Airfield in Omaha at 6:41 p.m. Central time, bound for Los Angeles International Airport.
The cabin crew discovered that there was a problem with the intercom that they use to communicate with one another and the pilots. A member of the crew then knocked on the locked cabin door to tell the pilots, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The pilots had also heard a static sound over the intercom and feared someone might be trying to break into the cockpit, an American Airlines representative told The Associated Press.
It turned out that the pilots heard static because the intercom had been left on by accident.
Because of the uncertainty, the pilots decided to land the plane, SkyWest said in a statement. It landed safely about 7:45 p.m.
“About 10 minutes in, we make a very hard U-turn,” said Brian Windhorst, a basketball writer for ESPN who was a passenger on the plane. “That wasn’t normal. There was no announcement.”
He said he saw one of the flight attendants knock on the cockpit door “many, many times.”
In a video that he took and posted on social media, a crew member tells the passengers after landing: “Since we weren’t able to communicate with each other, we weren’t sure if something was going on with the aircraft or not. So that’s why we came back here as a precautionary measure.”
“We pull into a holding area, and are immediately surrounded by police cars,” Mr. Windhorst said. “Three police officers got on board, and one asked the passengers if they were OK.”
The plane eventually returned to the gate, and passengers disembarked.
“The flight attendants and pilots might have been more unnerved than the passengers,” Mr. Windhorst said.
The plane, an Embraer E175, which holds about 80 passengers, eventually took off again at 10:45 p.m. with the same pilots but a new cabin crew. It arrived four hours late in Los Angeles.
Victor Mather, who has been a reporter and editor at The Times for 25 years, covers sports and breaking news.
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