You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The close call.
I’m on a Southwest Flight out of Portland.
We’re headed for Dallas for a quick stop and hop back to Nashville.
I’m in the middle seat and the flight is relatively unremarkable.
I’ve tried to sleep. I’ve had some peanuts. I’ve listened to any number of ridiculously tiring conversations from the row behind me.
It’s all pretty typical.
Then it gets squirrely, scary, different.
It is jarring like a couch spring popping through the cushion stinging you right in the ass.
“We’re going to be delayed into Dallas,” the pilot’s voice crackles over the intercom.
“Looks like we’ve got to re-route through Oklahoma and go around this storm,” he says.
“We should be an hour late,” he adds.
The weather has been weighing on my mind for a 1000 miles. I checked the radar before leaving Oregon and I could see a massive band of red and yellow ferociously moving out of the Gulf.
How would this affect us, I thought.
Dallas is in the cross hairs of violent winds and angry skies.
Delayed by an hour? Damn! Suddenly my thoughts go to my connecting flight.
Where will my bags end up, I wonder. What is in that bag that I will never see again.
I look out the window.
Suddenly where my bags are going is as important as a single leaf falling on my lawn during an autumn gust of wind.
I see a flash of purple and orange rise suddenly out of the clouds below us.
It is a plane. It appears to be a Southwest Plane coming out of the storm clouds all around us. I’m in the middle seat and I don’t have the greatest vision anymore, but I know what I know and the plane seems frighteningly close.
In that fraction of a second I surmise that jet is below us, close, and seemingly rising toward us. I guesstimate it is perhaps 500 feet to the left of us. If I had to place my hand on a bible and swear what I just saw, I would tell the court, the plane below us appeared to rapidly encroach our air space, then radically maneuver away from us, quickly disappearing back into the soup like cloud cover all around us.
The moment is a flash, but a lot can happen in a moment.
The Einstein properties of motion being relative in the absence of nothingness are quickly erased like a bucket of water tossed on a blackboard full of chalk.
We don’t normally feel speed in a plane. Usually it’s calm and the fact that we are traveling at 37,000 feet at 500 mph is lost upon the typical passenger who simply wants another bag of free peanuts.
But the flash, the moment reminds me how fast fast can be.
Suddenly the sheer speed of air travel fills my thoughts.
The plane below me is traveling at 500 mph in one direction. The plane I’m in is traveling at 500 mph in the opposite direction. That’s a 1000 mph crammed into a millisecond of a visual through a port-hole window from the middle seat.
Whoa. I am shaken by this uncomfortable moment. Did that really just happen?
“What?” my girlfriend asks.
“Oh my God,” I say, not really explaining anything.
My thoughts are sporadic, jumbled with all the things I think I just saw.
Clouds and flashes of wings and purple and yellow streaks in a dark grey sky.
I look out the window again.
The plane is gone.
“Did you see that?”
“No, what?,” she says.
“Another plane right below us.”
“Really?”
“Really!”
That’s when both women in row 13 look out the porthole and see a comtrail in the clouds beside us.
It’s not a comtrail, pencil thin, like you see high in a blue sky. It is thick like a king size comforter right off the left-wing.
“Wow! Look at that, the young woman in the window seat says, pulling her ear buds out of her ears.
I can tell there is concern.
Suddenly there is a crackle in the intercom. I am expecting the pilot to describe the near miss moments ago. Instead he says that we have been cleared to land in Dallas, we are not going through Oklahoma, and we are establishing our course into Love Field.
Hmmmm?
No mention of the close call? A sudden course correction and a strange close encounter with another plane, and nothing?
I immediately load the wi-fi on my smart phone that shows speed and direction telemetry. I screen shot it. I take a quick video out of the window and show the inside of the fuselage. I type up a quick note of what I saw, when I saw it, and what our flight is. As soon as we hit the ground, I send to my station asking the assignment desk to reach out to the FAA for answers.
As we get off the plane, I go up to the pilot and ask him about the near miss.
“Did we have a close call on the left side of the aircraft?,” I ask.
He stares at me nervously, his eyes darting side to side. I am recording him on my iPhone, but the camera is not pointed at his face.
“You mean that C-130?” he responds calmly.
“I don’t know what it was,” I say. “I just know it was close.”
“Close? It wasn’t close,” he says.
“Not close?,” I parrot. “OK.”
I walk off the plane.
Walking up the ramp I think the pilot is either lying to me or I don’t know what the hell I just witnessed.
By the time I land in Nashville, I see the FAA has responded to my query.
The FAA Spokesperson writes: I have not seen any reports of any losses of separation, and something as dramatic as you described would have been raised to my attention immediately.
Dallas Love Field and DFW Airport are seven miles apart, and certain flight routes into Love cross above or below the routes into DFW. Your viewer probably saw a Love-bound SWA flight on its dedicated flight path. Our rules for that airspace specify planes must be three miles apart horizontally (when two planes are at the same altitude) or 1,000 feet vertically if they are at different altitudes.
Additionally, all commercial jets are equipped with on-board systems that detect potential close calls and immediately alert the crew to take evasive action. These rare events are immediately reportable, and I’ve seen none of them today.”
I write back:
I am not an aviation expert, and judging aircraft distances at 1000 mph is not my specialty. I do know the planes were close. How close? I cannot say. Perhaps not close enough to register a close call within the system. I see that the vertical limit is 1000 feet. I would estimate that safety measure was violated. I cannot speculate how far horizontally the planes must be. I guesstimate it was 500 feet away. If that doesn’t generate an alarm electronically, it certainly did in this reporter who has covered wars and hurricanes and hostage shootouts.
She writes back:
I appreciate your concern. I’ve been there as a reporter dozens of times over the years, and I get calls several times a year from people who are certain they had a near collision. All I can tell you is that the technology we use to track airplanes – and the collision-avoidance technology aboard the planes themselves – is very precise. It has to be because lives depend on it. We safely manage more than 50,000 flights of all sizes every day.
If there had been an incident, I would have known within an hour. In fact, you would have known about it immediately because your pilot would have made an abrupt maneuver in response to a cockpit alarm instructing him to either climb, turn or dive.
And that’s it. A non event everywhere, except in my brain. To everyone else on planet Earth, this is just another flight in stormy weather that landed safely without incident.
But for this passenger, suddenly turned reporter, it was something more.
It was a reminder that life is precious and can change in the time it takes a purple and orange streak to rise out of a dark storm cloud over some obscure compass heading 37,000 feet in the sky.
A non event?
That’s easy for someone on the ground pushing paper to say.
When you are in the middle seat of a close call, it’s time for an adult diaper and a stiff drink.
Oh Stewardess!
Life’s Crazy™