You’ve already heard plenty of Blizzard of ’16 stories, but you haven’t heard about Southwest Airlines Flight 451.
The Boeing 737 took off from Philadelphia International Airport on Jan. 22 at around 6:52 a.m. and was headed for Fort Lauderdale. The 142 passengers aboard — many headed for Caribbean cruises — were thrilled to be leaving the Northeast just hours ahead of a historic storm that was barreling up the East Coast.
There was a lot of air turbulence that morning, especially over the Carolinas. But it is what happened when Flight 451 tried to land in fog-choked Lauderdale — which was getting the tail end of Winter Storm Jonas — that makes most of the other blizzard experiences pale in comparison.
A passenger named Bonnie told me that the plane came in rough and was only feet off the tarmac when the pilot suddenly changed his mind and abruptly took the craft back up.
Frightened passengers were told that either the pilot or Air Traffic Control didn’t like how he was coming in and aborted the landing.
Bonnie and some cruise-mates were taking the edge off over glasses of wine in Miami Beach when they told me and others what had happened.
“We circled for three hours,” she said, still shaken. Eventually the plane was running low on fuel and needed to land in Orlando, hundreds of miles away.
Other women who were on the plane confirmed the story.
I asked Southwest about the incident and whether it had been reported to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The airline confirmed that Flight 451 needed to be diverted to Orlando “due to heavy thunderstorms impacting Air Traffic Control arrival rates at Southeast Florida airports” and that its “pilots and network controllers are in constant contact” with the FAA.
But the airline also claims “there’s nothing mechanically or procedurally out of the normal to report.”
Huh! Maybe Bonnie and her friends were imagining this.
Perhaps someone at the FAA should ask the pilot how close to landing he came. And why would he go back up into a thunderstorm?
Like the plane that morning, Southwest’s explanation sounds a little shaky.
Click here to check out just what a nightmare flying has become:
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