A passenger who was aboard the SkyWest flight that turned to avoid a B-52 bomber on Friday said it felt like going around a “sharp turn on a roller coaster.”
“The force of it kept me centered in my seat, but I could look out the window and see straight at the grass instead of seeing the horizon,” said Monica Green, who recorded video of the pilot making an announcement about the incident after landing in Minot, North Dakota.
“Just out of the blue, just sort of very abrupt U-turn,” she said.
The SkyWest flight had 76 passengers and four crew members on board at the time. B-52 bombers typically carry a crew of five, and the military aircraft was streaking low over Minot on its way to a flyover at the North Dakota State Fair.
“The flyover was planned in advance and approved by the Federal Aviation Administration,” Minot Air Force Base said on Monday.
The base said it communicated the flyover plans to Minot Approach Control and that the B-52 crew “communicated the flyover plan to both RAPCON and Minot International Airport’s air traffic control tower.”
“The B-52 crew contacted Minot International Airport tower and the tower provided instructions to continue 2 miles westbound after the flyover,” the base said. “The tower did not advise of the inbound commercial aircraft.”
In the video that Green recorded after the plane landed safely, the pilot calmly tells passengers: “For those of you on the right-hand side, you probably saw the airplane kinda sorta coming at us. Nobody told us about it and so we continued.”
“I don’t know how fast they were going but they were a lot faster than us,” he said, in part. “I thought the safest thing to do was to turn behind it. So, sorry about the aggressive maneuver. It caught me by surprise.”
“This is not normal at all,” he added.
Green said the pilot had told passengers while they were still in the air that he would inform them about what was going on once they landed safely.
“It was so crazy to not know what was happening in the moment and just hear it after the fact, and then just be let off the plane just to continue about our days as normal,” Green said.
The FAA is investigating and working to determine how close the planes were.
Green said the pilot did an amazing job and wants to thank him for making sure everyone was safe.
She also said she wants answers. The flight stuck with her during her trip home to Dallas on Monday.
“I was sweating,” she said. “I was shaking. I was not excited to get on and it really hit me once we started taking off.”
Brian Dakss
contributed to this report.
