FORT MYERS, Fla. (WSVN) — A pilot who noticed another plane on the runway in her path averted collision with her quick thinking, saving the passengers onboard a Frontier Flight 3796, an aircraft flying from Cleveland, Ohio to Fort Myers, Florida.
If trouble strikes while you’re on a flight, you hope for a few things: That the pilots in the cockpit know what they’re doing, that your fellow passengers stay calm, and that flight attendants remain composed, or at least look like it. The flight John Cunniff was on checked off all those things after he noticed that the seemingly smooth landing was anything but normal.
“I was sitting in a seat that had a flight attendant in one of the jump seats facing me and while that was going on, she kept a pretty good poker face,” he recalled, “But when I was getting off the plane, I mentioned to one of the other flight attendants, ‘I bet the pilots missing a heartbeat or two after that.’ And she said, ‘Not just the pilots, some of us flight attendants, too. We were very worried.'”
Cunniff said take off was smooth and the flight took about three hours, but when it came time to land, the pilot quickly maneuvered the plane back up to avoid another plane on the runway.
A video clip from FlightAware.com, a website that tracks flight patterns, showed that the quick ascension of the aircraft caused a redirection in the flight path.
“It seems like the very last minute that the pilot applied power and started to climb,” recounted Cunniff, “And it took a moment to realize, oh, we had to change from landing to going around again.”
The pilot managed to thrust the plan upward from 100 feet off the ground to 2,700 feet above the airport.
Cunniff acknowledged the pilot’s efforts in avoiding the other plane.
“Our pilot handled it really well,” he said. “You know, she obviously got the plane to a safe place and got us back down on the ground just fine.”
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating this incident.
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