A Southwest flight climbing away from Burbank Airport suddenly descended hundreds of feet Friday afternoon, possibly to avoid a mid-air collision.
The plane was at 14,100 feet above Angeles National Forest headed northeast to Las Vegas at 12:03 p.m. when it abruptly dropped to 13,625 feet, data from Flightradar24 showed.
The drop of around 500 feet came moments after the plane had been gaining altitude steadily since takeoff, causing tense moments on the plane. Passengers said on social media that they were startled by the move.
Steve Ulasewicz, 33, was on the plane. The Woodland Hills resident felt a sudden drop around eight minutes into the flight, and thought it might be bad turbulence.
After a two- or three-second pause, the plane went into “free fall for about eight to 10 seconds,” he said. “People were screaming. I felt my body come up and out of the chair.”
In a lifetime of flying, he had never felt anything like it. “I thought that was it — I thought we were all dead,” he said. “I don’t want to die,” Ulasewicz told his friend sitting nearby during the fall.
After the plane leveled out, passengers were confused. Ulasewicz wondered if there was a bird strike or mechanical issue. He waited the “longest two to three minutes of [his] life” before the pilot came on the intercom to announce the near collision, he said.
He saw a female attendant with an ice pack on her head. Unlike the passengers, she was not buckled in during the ascent as she prepared to serve beverages.
After the terror of the incident, Ulasewicz said the revelation that his plane was involved in a near miss changed his emotions to anger. He listed off a number of similar incidents in U.S. skies in recent months.
The commercial flight had to climb and descend to comply with two onboard traffic alerts, Southwest spokesperson Lynn Lunsford said in a statement to The Times.
“The flight continued to Las Vegas, where it landed uneventfully,” the statement said. “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,” Lunsford said.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating the incident in a written statement.
A jet was headed southwest to Naval Base Ventura County in Point Mugu and was at a similar altitude — 14,525 feet — when the Southwest flight dropped, per Flightradar24.
The planes were around five miles apart and within 400 vertical feet of one another, headed in opposite directions, when the Southwest flight took evasive action, flight data on the website showed.
A Times analysis of the flight data estimated that the aircraft could have collided within 20 seconds of the diversion if the planes had each held course. The military craft was descending from above as the commercial flight ascended from below, making a collision over the mountains northeast of Santa Clarita possible.
The jet stopped its own steady descent and maintained its height for several minutes after the incident. It was unclear whether the jet belonged to the military, as its listed owner was a corporation in Delaware. The naval base did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The plane landed in Las Vegas at 12:39 p.m. Friday.
There has been growing focus on aviation safety in recent months.
A series of radar outages at Newark Liberty International Airport brought massive flight delays in May. Federal officials continue to investigate the January collision in Washington between a commercial jet and a military helicopter that killed 67 people.
In San Diego, a private jet crashed, killing all six on board, in June. A federal investigation found the aircraft was flying too low before it hit power lines and slammed into a house.
The automated system that provides weather conditions and runway lights weren’t operating at the airport before the plane crashed, the report confirmed.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
