LYNN, Mass. — A thousand times a day, JetBlue Airlines planes land safely at their destinations. But not always on the first try. Case in point: JetBlue flight 1940, arriving in Boston Sunday after a three-hour flight from Florida’s Sarasota/Bradenton International Airport.
Among the passengers onboard: Lynn residents Arn Conti and his wife.
“It was a great flight,” he said. “Uneventful. I was looking out my window to the right and I could see the wing, and the ground coming up to the wing.”
Conti said from his perspective the Airbus A-320 hovered maybe ten to twenty feet off the ground. But just as he was anticipating the comforting buffet of wheels hitting runway, the jet suddenly lurched back into the sky and began a hard turn left.
“It was a nice, smooth, perfect approach and all of a sudden he just went boom!” Conti said. “Everybody was like, Oh My God, what’s going on.”
What was going on, according to the FAA and the airline, was a routine missed approach -- also known as a go-around.
“The airplane is essentially aborting the landing,” said Ben Sawyer, a pilot and flight instructor for ATP in Norwood. “If the pilot deems for any reason that the landing is going to be unsafe, they’ll decide to do a go-around.”
Reasons for go-arounds vary, he said: “It could be you’re getting lots of gusts of wind, you’re not aligned with the centerline of the runway, it could be you’re coming in too fast.”
Those situations create an ‘unstable’ approach -- that is, one that could prove dangerous if continued -- and it’s the reason the pilot of JetBlue 1940 gave as his reason for the missed approach. More specifically, JetBlue told Boston 25 News wind was a factor in not allowing the pilot to get the plane on the ground fast enough.
But Conti said instability was not mentioned when the pilot finally addressed passengers.
“He said, We’re experiencing ground traffic.”
However, the FAA told Boston 25 News no other aircraft was involved in this missed approach.
Sawyer said missed approaches may be frightening to passengers -- both because they are jarring -- but also because some are associated with avoiding collisions with other aircraft -- so-called ground incursions. But he says passengers can also take some comfort in them.
“You’re coming in to land, you see the ground getting closer and closer and you’re thinking, okay, we’re about to land and suddenly you hear the engines throttle up and you’re climbing,” he said. “Whoa! Is something wrong? But it’s actually a good sign of good decision-making on the pilot’s part. There’s no reason to ever try to salvage an unstable approach and put people’s lives at risk.”
Sawyer said recent aviation incidents -- horrific as they have been -- shouldn’t frighten passengers from flying.
“Just remember that aviation is still the safest form of travel that humans have ever created,” he said. “Maybe for every time that there’s a crash and something goes wrong, there are 500 times the same thing happened but the pilot executed the emergency procedures perfectly, they figured everything out and everything went right. I don’t think we hear about that as much as the terrible crashes that happen.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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