A SkyWest flight had to perform a go-around maneuver after it nearly collided with a B-52 bomber Friday before landing in North Dakota.
The air traffic control tower had cleared the plane to approach the airport, but the pilot “performed a go-around when another aircraft became visible in their flight path,” SkyWest said in a statement.
The SkyWest pilot identified the second plane as a B-52 bomber. The Air Force said Sunday evening that it was “looking into” reports of a military aircraft “operating in the same airspace” as a commercial airplane. It added that a B-52 assigned to Minot Air Force Base had conducted a flyover of the North Dakota State Fair on Friday evening.
Delta Flight 3788, operated by SkyWest, landed safely in Minot, North Dakota, after it flew in from Minneapolis, the airline said.
SkyWest said it is investigating the incident.
The near-collision Friday comes just six months after a military helicopter hit a passenger plane near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, killing 67 people.
In video posted to social media and verified by NBC News, the plane’s pilot explains to passengers what happened in the air and apologizes for what he called an “aggressive maneuver.”
The pilot says that the ATC tower instructed him to turn right but that when he looked over, he saw a B-52 bomber. He says that he was then instructed to turn left but that at that point, he looked over and “saw the airplane that was kind of coming on a converging course with us.”
The second aircraft was moving faster than the SkyWest plane, the pilot says, so he made the decision to turn behind it.
“So, sorry about the aggressive maneuver. It caught me by surprise,” the pilot says in the video. “This is not normal at all. I don’t know why they didn’t give us a heads up.”
The pilot concludes: “Long story short, it was not fun, but I do apologize for it, and thank you for understanding.” The passengers applaud, the video shows.
The passenger who recorded the video, Monica Green, said she was “so sick to my stomach that that was so close to happening.”
She said she felt the plane take a hard turn and then “I just remember the plane going, like, sideways … and just looking straight out the window and just seeing grass, like you weren’t seeing the skyline anymore.” She said she is anxious about returning to the airport in Minot to fly home.
In the video, the pilot also mentions that the tower that serves Minot International Airport does not have a radar and that controllers rely only on visuals to make calls.
The Air Force Base nearby does have radar, the pilot says, which causes him to wonder why nobody said, “Hey, there’s also a B-52 in the pattern.”
NBC News aviation analyst Jeff Guzzetti said the lack of radar capability at smaller airport is not at all uncommon.
“There are many small airports across the country that have commercial service that don’t have radar. Instead, they’ll have some sort of coordinating communication with another radar facility several miles away, perhaps with a military base,” Guzzetti said.
Since the airport in Minot is so small, the federal government allows it to be a “contract tower,” Guzzetti said. That means the air traffic controllers are not federal employees but are contractors hired by the FAA who are usually retired controllers.
Contract towers are also not unheard of, he said — there are 265 of them in the United States.
The key question, Guzzetti said, is how much coordination there was between the Air Force base and the airport.
“I wouldn’t think that you would need a more powerful radar system or a larger tower to prevent things like this,” Guzzetti said. “I just think that you need good coordination between the military base and the local civilian airport to work together to avoid these types of near misses.”
