Alarms sounded in the cockpit of a Southwest Airlines jet shortly after taking off from Hollywood Burbank airport near Los Angeles on Friday, prompting evasive maneuvers, the airline said in a statement.
Southwest Flight 1496, operating on a Boeing 737, took off just before noon local time on a short flight to Las Vegas. 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, according to the flight tracking site Flightradar24.
“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.
CNN has reached out to Hunter Aviation International, the registered owner of the fighter jet.
Most commercial planes are equipped with a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, often called TCAS, which can direct pilots to climb or descended to avoid getting too close to other planes.
TCAS works independently of ground air traffic control, searching nearby airspace using radio frequencies from transponders in other aircraft.
CNN’s Sarah Dewberry contributed to this report.
