On Friday evening, a B-52 plane nearly had a close encounter with a connecting flight to Minneapolis and a Bailey Zimmerman concert in Minot, North Dakota.
Videos by Wide Open Country
All while Zimmerman was getting ready to play at the North Dakota State Fair for his New To Country Summer Tour, a Delta Connection flight to Minneapolis was planning to descend into the North Dakota airport.
However, the pilot was caught off guard when he saw a military plane, a B-52 Stratofortress, flying right towards them.
According to the Air Force, the B-52 might have belonged to the Minot Air Force Base nearby, which had done a flyover of the fair that evening. They confirmed that it was, in fact, "a B-52 aircraft assigned to Minot [Air Force Base] that conducted a flyover of the North Dakota State Fair."
Pilot Addresses What Happened in the Almost-Collision
The pilot of the Delta Connection flight, whose identity hasn't been disclosed, told his passengers after avoiding a potential collision that "It caught me by surprise," and that "this is not normal at all."
One passenger captured a video of the pilot's speech after he landed them in Minot.
@azamora616 #plane#nearmiss#flight3788 @delta ? original sound - Andrea
The pilot informed the passengers that the airport space they were near did not have radar coverage, making it harder to detect oncoming traffic, and also that nobody he was in communication with had warned him that a B-52 was nearby.
The pilot said that they were told to report "about 6 miles from the airport," which they did, and were told to turn the plane right for landing. After they turned, the pilot said, "And I looked over and there was an airplane."
The pilot was then instructed to turn left, and when he realized that a plane was coming right towards them, he attempted what he claimed was "an aggressive maneuver."
"Given his speed, it was a military, I didn't know how fast they were going, but they were a lot faster than us. I felt it was the safest thing to do to turn behind it."
Luckily, no one from the plane or the fair was harmed on Friday. Since the incident, the FAA and SkyWest have announced their efforts to investigate what exactly prompted the close call.
Photo by: Jason Kempin/Getty Images
