A Southwest jet departing from Burbank Airport unexpectedly plummeted hundreds of feet Friday afternoon, potentially to escape a mid-air collision.
At 12:03 p.m., the jet was 14,100 feet above Angeles National Forest, heading northeast to Las Vegas, when it quickly descended to 13,625 feet, according to Flightradar24.
The plummet of around 500 feet occurred shortly after the plane had been slowly gaining altitude since launch, producing tense moments on the plane. The move caught passengers off guard, according to social media posts.
Steve Ulasewicz, 33, was on the plane. The Woodland Hills resident saw a sharp drop around eight minutes into the trip and assumed it was nasty turbulence.
After a two- or three-second pause, the plane entered “free fall for about eight to ten seconds,” he explained. “People screamed. I felt my body rise out of the chair.”
In his whole life of flying, he had never felt anything like this. “I thought that was it — I thought we were all dead,” he joked. “I don’t want to die,” Ulasewicz told a buddy sitting nearby in the autumn.
Passengers were perplexed as the jet leveled out. Ulasewicz asked if there was a bird strike or a mechanical problem. He waited for the “longest two to three minutes of [his] life” until the pilot announced the near collision over the intercom, he added.
He spotted a female attendant with an ice pack on her head. Unlike the passengers, she was not belted in during the ascent as she prepared to serve drinks.
Following the panic of the occurrence, Ulasewicz stated that learning that his plane was engaged in a near miss turned his emotions to rage. He cited a handful of comparable events in US skies in recent months.
Southwest spokesperson Lynn Lunsford told The Times that the commercial flight had to rise and descend to respond to two onboard traffic alerts.
“The flight continued to Las Vegas, where it landed uneventfully,” the statement stated. “Southwest is engaged with the Federal Aviation Administration to further understand the circumstances.”
“No injuries were immediately reported by Customers, but two Flight Attendants are being treated for injuries,” according to Lunsford.
In a written statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said that it was investigating the incident.
According to Flightradar24, a jet was flying southwest toward Naval Base Ventura County in Point Mugu at a similar altitude — 14,525 feet — when the Southwest flight crashed.
The planes were about five miles away and within 400 vertical feet of each other, traveling in different directions, when the Southwest flight took evasive action, according to flight data on the website.
According to a Times review of the flight data, the planes might have collided within 20 seconds of the diversion if each had stayed on course. The military aircraft was descending from above while the commercial flight was ascending from below, posing the possibility of a collision over the mountains northeast of Santa Clarita.
The airplane halted its own gradual descent and remained aloft for several minutes after the incident. It was unclear whether the jet belonged to the military, given the listed owner was a Delaware corporation. The naval base did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The jet landed in Las Vegas at 12:39 p.m. on Friday.
There has been a greater emphasis on aircraft safety in recent months.
A series of radar outages at Newark Liberty International Airport caused huge flight delays in May. Federal investigators are still investigating the January collision in Washington between a commercial jet and a military helicopter, which killed 67 people.
A private jet crashed near San Diego in June, killing all six people on board. A government inquiry determined that the aircraft was flying too low before colliding with power wires and crashing into a house.
The automated system that delivers weather conditions and runway lights at the airport was not operational before to the plane’s crash, according to the investigation.
