After less than six minutes in the air, a privately owned Hawker Hunter fighter jet, crossed less than two miles in front of it within a few hundred feet of its altitude . . . “There was a small initial drop that I thought was just like really bad turbulence,” passenger Steve Ulasewicz told CNN. “And then after that, there was this long free fall.”
He describes being terrified, people screaming and pandemonium in the cabin.
“I definitely thought that the plane was going down, that there was a mechanical issue with it,” Ulasewicz said. Eventually the pilots got on the intercom and told the passengers they had to maneuver the plane to avoid the midair collision.
“The crew of Southwest Flight 1496 responded to two onboard traffic alerts Friday afternoon… requiring them to climb and descend to comply with the alerts,” said Lynn Lunsford, Southwest spokesman in a statement. “Southwest is engaged with the Federal Aviation Administration to further understand the circumstances.”
The fighter jet was flying from El Paso, Texas to Oxnard, California.
The FAA is investigating. It’s not clear if the aircraft were directed so close together or if one of them was in a location where they were not supposed to be.
When the alarms sounded, the Southwest plane dropped about 475 feet and then went back up about 600 feet over the course of about a minute, according to Flightradar24. The fighter jet went up about 100 feet in just a few seconds.
Two Southwest flight attendants are being treated for injuries, but no passengers were hurt, the airline said.
The passenger jet did not declare an emergency and continued the 39-minute flight to Las Vegas, landing about nine minutes ahead of schedule.
Can someone explain to me how an individual manages to own a fighter jet??
It’s owned by a company, a British Defense Contractor in this case. Pretty common for outdated military jets actually.
But why? To show off to clients?
Not an industry that I work in, but I know that older jets are often used for general training purposes.
For instance, NASA astronauts still train in T-38 Talons, originally built between 1961-1972. The Space Shuttle Trainers were a modified Gulfstream II, introduced in 1967, before they were retired in 2012 with the Shuttle program.
The first civilian orbital mission, the Inspiration4 crew trained in a MiG-29 which is privately owned by Jared Isaacman, who led the private mission launched by SpaceX back in 2021. The mission was a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, raising over $243 Million in donations. They also performed a number of experiments while in orbit for SpaceX, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine. Studies specifically intended to see the effects of orbital flight on ordinary citizens that weren’t previously screened and exhaustively trained as professional astronauts.
Older fighter jets are still good for training things at supersonic speeds, real world G forces, etc. that simulators can’t reproduce perfectly.
Thanks for the info. Appreciate it.
That’s the thing that really stood out to me the 1st time I saw this story. A fighter plane registered to a Delaware based company, that was flying to an Air Force base. Real weird.
Delaware based company means nothing. Something like 90+% of companies in the US on paper are based in Delaware because of very corporate-friendly laws, and they can do business in the rest of the country just fine.
This particular company is the US portion of a British Defense Contractor.
Maybe it was this one…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
It’s probably rented out for events like air shows, maybe film and tv use too.
It is a classic 50’s era fighter. Some are sold relatively cheaply, https://historicandclassicaircraftsales.com/hawker-hunter-ga-11, but it really depends. Airworthy ones with engines are more expensive by a lot. Still, they are not in the tens of millions like you might expect.