Two flight attendants were injured when a Southwest Airlines plane suddenly descended after its initial climb from Hollywood Burbank Airport in Southern California on Friday, the airline said in a statement.
The abrupt drop happened after two safety alerts sounded in the cockpit, the second such incident involving commercial flights in a week, according to the statement.
The pilots of Southwest Airlines Flight 1496 made the maneuver shortly after takeoff, when an onboard system detected another aircraft nearby, setting off two alerts from the collision avoidance system in the plane. The safety alert system is designed to help pilots prevent midair collisions by telling a pilot to either climb or descend to reduce the risk of a collision. No details were immediately available on the other aircraft involved in the episode.
“The crew of Southwest Flight 1496 responded to two onboard traffic alerts Friday afternoon while climbing out of Burbank, Calif., requiring them to climb and descend to comply with the alerts,” a spokesman for the Southwest Airlines said in statement.
The extent of the flight attendants’ injuries is unknown. No passengers were injured, the airline said.
Some people who said they were passengers aboard the Boeing 737 described on social media how travelers had been jolted out of their seats when the plane changed course. They said that the pilot had made an announcement that a collision warning had sounded.
Mike Christensen, a spokesman for Hollywood Burbank Airport, said in an email on Friday that there had been no indication of a near miss in the airspace above the airport, as some passengers had characterized it on social media. He referred questions about the episode to Southwest Airlines.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the agency was investigating, adding that “ensuring the safety of everyone in the national airspace system remains our top priority.”
According to FlightAware, an aircraft-tracking site, Flight 1496 briefly lost about 300 feet of altitude around five minutes into the 57-minute journey from Burbank to Las Vegas.
On July 18, a regional airline jet operating a code-share flight for Delta Air Lines made an “aggressive maneuver” to avoid a midair collision with a B-52 bomber over North Dakota.
The passenger jet in that instance, SkyWest Airlines Flight 3788, was traveling from Minneapolis to Minot, N.D., when it aborted a landing because the military aircraft was in its flight path.
No one was injured, but a passenger said that people had been unnerved by the experience, including the pilot, who made an announcement explaining what had happened.
These episodes have continued to raise concerns about the nation’s air traffic control system, which drew intense scrutiny when, on Jan. 29, an Army Black Hawk helicopter struck American Airlines Flight 5342, which was landing at Reagan National Airport near Washington, killing 67 people.
Mark Walker is an investigative reporter for The Times focused on transportation. He is based in Washington.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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