Jetliner Swerves To Avoid Fighter Jets 727 Pilot’s Evasive Action Throws 3 People To Floor

One or two F-16 fighters repeatedly closed in on a Boeing 727 passenger jet bound for Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday afternoon, forcing the airliner to take emergency evasive actions so sudden that two flight attendants and a passenger were thrown to the cabin floor, according to the airline and air traffic controllers.

The incident began when two fighter jets from the New Jersey Air National Guard were cleared to fly into the area by a Navy control center called Giant Killer.

Officials from various wings of the military gave conflicting explanations for why the fighters got so close to the passenger jet.

Officials say the military pilots should have been told about the civilian plane in the area and thus should have stayed 20 miles away. The Navy insisted on Thursday that the fighters had been warned, but the commander of the 177th Fighter Wing of the Air National Guard in Atlantic City, where the jets were based, said they had not, and that one of the fighter pilots, thinking the civilian jet was an intruder or possibly an airplane in distress, intercepted it to investigate.

The civilian jet, a Nations Air flight from San Juan, was on course and flying normally about 70 miles south of Kennedy when its anticollision warning system sounded a shrill alarm in the cockpit. Following the system’s emergency instructions, the captain threw the plane into a steep dive, then a steep climb. Two flight attendants making a final pass through the cabin for cups and soda cans were thrown to the floor, one on top of the other, and a passenger returning from the lavatory was also thrown down.

“Everybody was shook up,” said Mark McDonald, the president of Nations Air. “You’re trained to react, but you never want to get in that situation.”

McDonald and air traffic controllers said that the encounter was not a passing event, and that the F-16s appeared to linger in the area, as the planes traveled together at nearly 500 miles per hour, beginning at about 28,000 feet.

“Either they screwed up or they were having fun,” said McDonald. “It’s one of the two. There’s no other way to look at it.”

But Col. Thomas Griffin, the Air National Guard commander, said: “I won’t rule out it was close enough to set off the collision-avoidance system. I would rule out that it was any threat at all.”

The F-16s are not armed, although they carry dummy heat-seeking missiles on each wingtip. The single-seat, single-engine jet fighters were in the area to practice interceptions.

On Thursday, the Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration said they would investigate the incident, while the Navy said it would investigate the actions of its control center.