Pilots said nothing as Southwest plane flew dangerously low over Tampa Bay, passenger says

Southwest Airlines Flight 425 was cruising over the waters of Tampa Bay the evening of July 14 when passengers were startled by a sharp jolt upward.

“We got way down low, and then all of a sudden, just pulled up, and they didn’t say anything at first,” said passenger Amy Giannotti, referring to the pilots. “Everybody was sort of looking at each other.”

What passengers weren’t told at the time is that the plane’s rapid descent toward the water put them one wind gust away from disaster, according to aviation experts.

The incident began more than four miles out from Tampa International Airport as the plane dipped below the clouds and took a final descent that felt normal to those on board.

“You would have never known that anything was wrong,” Giannotti told the Tampa Bay Times this week. “We didn’t drop from the sky. It was a slow descent, like normal.”

But the plane was not heading for a runway. Instead, it was fast approaching the Courtney Campbell Causeway, a 10-mile bridge over Tampa Bay. They were more than 1,000 feet below where the the FAA’s flight path chart says they should have been.

The aircraft flew within just 150 feet of the water — shorter than the plane’s wingspan — before climbing back to safety. The descent stopped when air traffic control radioed the plane with a low altitude alert.

Giannotti, a 51-year-old environmental scientist from Orlando, had been in Columbus, Ohio, visiting family. The plane was lucky to depart when it did, she said, because a storm hit just after take off.

From her middle seat in the fifth row, she could see a light rain after the plane descended beneath the cloud cover, but there was little turbulence — the only bumps came minutes before, over the Gulf of Mexico near Tallahassee. The plane had been asked to circle for about an hour over southern Georgia because of storms in its path.

The plane flew over the bay just after 7 p.m. Though pilots had been communicative before, they told passengers nothing as the plane flew dangerously close to the water in what certified flight instructor Robert Katz called a “near-fatal” incident.

It soon became clear that they would not be landing at Tampa International Airport. Pilots told air traffic control they would have to “go around” instead, according to a recording taken from an air traffic control monitoring website. The flight quickly regained altitude and rose through the clouds again.

About five minutes later, pilots addressed the change in course. They would be rerouting to Fort Lauderdale, one of the pilots told passengers, because the plane did not have enough fuel to attempt another landing in Tampa.

The plane arrived 30 minutes later, fueled up and idled on the ground. Passengers, including a businessman sitting next to Giannotti, grumbled about the delay.

It was then that pilots offered a different explanation, Giannotti said.

The issue at Tampa had been high wind speeds on the runway. Soon the plane departed Fort Lauderdale and arrived at Tampa without further incident.

For Katz, a pilot with more than 40 years of experience, neither explanation holds up.

If fuel was the issue, he said, then why redirect to Fort Lauderdale, 200 miles to the southeast, instead of much closer airports in Orlando or Fort Myers? And if runway speeds had prevented safe landing, then how was it that several flights immediately before and after Southwest Flight 425 landed without issue?

He said that based on a review of flight tracking data and air traffic control communications, the most likely explanation is a simpler one: pilot fatigue. The flight to Tampa was that plane’s fourth in a day that began just before 6 a.m., with stops in Indianapolis, Fort Lauderdale and Columbus. It was unclear, however, how many of those flights the Tampa crew had been on.

A Southwest spokesperson declined to answer why the flight was rerouted to Fort Lauderdale or what caused pilots to descend to 150 feet over the water, citing an ongoing investigation.

“Southwest is following its robust Safety Management System and is in contact with the Federal Aviation Administration to understand and address any irregularities,” the spokesperson said.

“Ultimately it comes down to the one weak link in the chain, which is the human factor,” Katz said. “I’m beginning to suspect that this crew did not have adequate rest.”

If this were the case, Katz said, the decision to reroute to Fort Lauderdale may have been a dangerous one because it kept the plane in the air longer and increased the window for a dangerous error.

The federal investigation into the flight will likely address these questions, Katz said, examining the amount of rest that crew members had and whether it was safe for them to carry out this flight.

The Tampa flight and other recent Southwest near-misses have triggered an airline-wide safety review by the Federal Aviation Administration, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. A similar incident took place in Oklahoma City in June, the Associated Press reported, when a Southwest flight descended to an altitude of 525 feet while still over the city’s suburbs.

“Southwest is working closely with the Federal Aviation Administration in the review of recent events,” the airline’s spokesperson said. “Nothing is more important to Southwest than the safety of our customers and employees.”

Katz said the issue is not unique to Southwest — airlines have an incentive to keep their planes in the air as much as possible to maximize profits, and that often means pushing crews and equipment.

“Every airline will say safety first, and that’s a great party line, but that doesn’t mitigate the pressure to keep a schedule,” he said. “That’s the only way that an airline can turn a profit.”

The airline sent Giannotti a $100 voucher for a future flight two days later, but she has been unable to get answers about why her flight came so close to calamity.

Giannotti said she is “glad” she did not know the extent of the danger while on the flight, but she’s had trouble sleeping since then. She wonders whether her future flights will be safe.

“I fly Southwest a lot, and I find that disturbing,” she said. “Where are the alarms? Were they just asleep at the wheel?”