A regional jet flying through the Midwest had a close call on Friday, July 18, when a military plane reportedly entered its flight path without warning.
The incident occurred on a Delta Connection flight operated by SkyWest Airlines out of Minneapolis. As the Embraer E175 aircraft began its landing approach at North Dakota’s Minot International Airport (MOT), the airline pilot had to make a sudden “aggressive maneuver” to avoid colliding with a B-52 military aircraft that suddenly appeared, according to ABC News.
“All of a sudden we just jerk really hard,” Monica Green, a passenger on board the flight, told ABC News after the incident. “We just kept taking more turns and more turns and [the pilot] gets on the announcement and says, ‘I’m sorry everybody, I’ll explain everything once we’ve landed safely.’”
The Air Force was flying the military plane from a nearby base for a flyover in the area. “We can confirm that a B-52 aircraft assigned to Minot AFB conducted a flyover of the North Dakota State Fair Friday evening,” a spokesperson told CNN.
Once the plane was on the ground, the pilot shared his thought process with passengers. The pilot had initially been cleared for landing and received no warning about the military plane from air traffic controllers. “There’s no radar here, so the tower does everything visually,” the pilot said, according to a recording posted to TikTok. “Given his speed—I don’t know how fast they were going, but they were a lot faster than us—I felt it was the safest thing to do to turn behind it. So sorry about the aggressive maneuver, it caught me by surprise. This is not normal at all. I don’t know why they didn’t give us a heads up, because the Air Force base does have radar.”
The Minot, North Dakota, control tower isn’t operated by the FAA, but rather by a contractor called Midwest ATC, according to CNN. However, the FAA is reportedly investigating the incident, along with the Air Force and the regional airline. “SkyWest flight 3788, operating as Delta Connection from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Minot, North Dakota on July 18, landed safely in Minot after being cleared for approach by the tower but performed a go-around when another aircraft became visible in their flight path,” a SkyWest spokesperson said in a statement. “We are investigating the incident.”
The close call between a military aircraft and passenger jet is especially poignant as it follows January’s fatal mid-collision between a military Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet in Washington, DC, which killed 67 people. Since that tragic incident, the FAA has been reviewing air traffic safety protocols across the nation. In April, the agency found immediate “similar issues” with the proximity of planes and helicopters’ flight paths operating out of the Las Vegas airport and made changes to the protocols at that hub.
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