B-52 close call forces commercial flight to make ‘aggressive maneuver’

“You probably saw the airplane kind of sort of coming at us,” the pilot later told the passengers. “Nobody told us about it.”

North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong, who was among those at the fair, posted an image of the bomber passing over the event.

The encounter took place as the SkyWest jet descended toward the airport from its cruising altitude of 34,000 feet. It was on a direct path to one of the airport’s runways and had passed under 4,000 feet when it sharply increased its rate of descent and abruptly banked to the right, according to the flight tracking websites Flightradar24.com and FlightAware.com. The commercial jet then quickly climbed and accelerated, gaining nearly 2,000 feet of altitude as it circled around for another approach.

On that same Friday evening, nearby Minot Air Force Base, home of the 5th Bomb Wing, had been planning for a B-52 to perform an “incredibly low” flyover of the North Dakota State Fair at around 1,000 feet, according to local newspaper the Minot Daily News. The bomber’s flyover was timed to coincide with an evening concert by country star Bailey Zimmerman.

North Dakota’s state fairground sits just across the railroad tracks southeast of Minot’s airport — the same direction from which the commercial jet was coming.

As he explained the cause of the unsettling maneuver to passengers, the pilot said that the Minot airport’s air traffic control facility does not have radar and operates visually. But, he added, the Air Force does have radar.

“It caught me by surprise. This is not normal at all,” the pilot said in the recording. “I don’t know why they didn’t give us a heads up, because the Air Force base does have radar and nobody said, ‘Hey, there’s also a B-52 in the pattern.'”

“Long story short, it was not fun, but I do apologize for it.”

The Minot airport is one of hundreds in the U.S. whose air traffic control towers are staffed by contract controllers — employees of private companies rather than federal employees. The FAA says contract controllers must meet the same qualifications and training requirements as the agency’s own controllers.

The incident comes six months after 67 people died in a low-altitude crash between a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet that was approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.