US plane lands after pilots fear someone is trying to enter cockpit
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The American Airlines plane eventually took off again at 10.45pm with the same pilots but a new cabin crew and arrived four hours late in Los Angeles.
PHOTO: SHIROMALEIALOHA/X
Victor Mather
A flight returned to Omaha, Nebraska, shortly after take-off on the evening of Oct 20 when the pilots mistakenly thought someone might be trying to break into the cockpit.
American Airlines Flight 6469, operated by SkyWest, took off from Eppley Airfield in Omaha at 6.41pm Central time (7.41am on Oct 21 in Singapore), bound for Los Angeles International Airport.
The cabin crew discovered that there was a problem with the intercom that they use to communicate with one another and the pilots. A member of the crew then knocked on the locked cabin door to tell the pilots, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The pilots had also heard a static sound over the intercom and feared someone might be trying to break into the cockpit, an American Airlines representative told The Associated Press.
It turned out that the pilots heard static because the intercom had been left on by accident.
Due to the uncertainty, the pilots decided to land the plane, SkyWest said in a statement. It landed safely at about 7.45pm.
“About 10 minutes in, we make a very hard U-turn,” said Mr Brian Windhorst, a basketball writer for ESPN who was sitting in the third row on the plane. “That wasn’t normal. There was no announcement.”
He said he saw one of the flight attendants knock on the cockpit door “many, many times”.
In a video he took and that his wife posted on social media, a crew member tells the passengers after landing: “Since we weren’t able to communicate with each other, we weren’t sure if something was going on with the aircraft or not. So that’s why we came back here as a precautionary measure.”
Mr Windhorst said: “We pull into a holding area and are immediately surrounded by police cars. Three police officers got on board, and one asked the passengers if they were OK.”
The plane eventually returned to the gate, and passengers disembarked.
“The flight attendants and pilots might have been more unnerved than the passengers,” Mr Windhorst added.
The plane, an Embraer E175, which holds about 80 passengers, eventually took off again at 10.45pm with the same pilots but a new cabin crew. It arrived four hours late in Los Angeles. NYTIMES
Additional reporting by Alexandra Petri and Mark Walker