A Boeing 737 aircraft suddenly plummeted to less than 500 feet of the ground over Oklahoma, terrifying residents who feared the jet was going to crash.
Southwest Airlines Flight 4069 was still nine miles away from Will Rogers World Airport just after midnight on Wednesday, when records show it dived to between 400 and 500 feet as it flew over a high school in the City of Yukon.
Doorbell camera footage showed the Boeing 737 MAX-8 then hovering above houses, before it flies out of frame.
A resident was startled awake by the plane’s engine and wondered if the aircraft was set for a collision.
‘It woke me up and I thought it was gonna hit my house,’ the resident wrote on the Yukon Happenings Facebook page, according to The Oklahoman.
A Southwest commercial flight flew just about 500 feet over a residential neighborhood in Oklahoma early Wednesday
The pilot confirmed to air traffic controllers that there was no issue with the Boeing 737
The sudden descent prompted air traffic control to call the pilot and check on the status of the flight.
‘Southwest 4069, low altitude alert,’ the air traffic controller could be heard saying in an audio archive of the transmission.
‘You good out there?’ he asked.
The pilot of the commercial flight from Las Vegas confirmed there was no issue with the aircraft, and circled back around – quickly regaining altitude from just about 450 feet to more than 1,000 feet as it crossed over Yukon High School.
It then landed safely at the airport in a different runway, and Air Traffic Control personnel confirmed there were no issues with the Boeing 737 Max-8, according to The Oklahoman.
But the low approach, along with the late hour, caused concern among residents in the city.
‘I was kind of like halfway in between sleep, being awake, and I just hear that WHOOSH,’ Spencer Basoco told KFOR.
‘And I thought at first, like a storm was blowing in… because it just sounded like a wall of wind.
‘And I looked out the window where the sound was coming from… if you go a few blocks away is the high school. And I just see a plane,’ he recounted.
‘I knew it wasn’t normal.’
Southwest officials said they are working with the Federal Aviation Administration to determine what caused the sudden descent.
‘Southwest is following its robust Safety Management System and is in contact with the Federal Aviation Administration to understand and address any irregularities with the aircraft’s approach to the airport,’ they said in a statement.
‘Nothing is more important to Southwest than the safety of our customers and employees.’
But the sudden plunge comes as Boeing continues to make headlines for broken landing gears, doors popping off mid-flight and faulty software systems leading to catastrophic crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019 that resulted in multiple deaths.
Boeing’s struggles in 2024 began in January when a panel called a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max shortly after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, in January.
Current and former Boeing employees have accused the company of taking safety shortcuts, and the Arlington, Virginia-based company is under investigations by the FAA, the National Transportation Safety Board and the Justice Department.
Earlier this month, a Boeing plane also experienced a rare Dutch roll – a combination of a yawing motion when the tail slides and the plane rocks from wingtip to wingtip.
As the bad news spread, it came to light that whistleblowers who have spoken out about the culture at the company had been fired.
The latest whistleblower, Sam Mohawk, a quality assurance investigator at Boeing’s 737 assembly plant near Seattle, told the subcommittee that ‘nonconforming’ parts — ones that could be defective or aren’t properly documented — could be winding up in 737 Max jets.
On January 5, the door plug blew out on a flight above Oregon causing an emergency landing and a massive federal probe into airline safety
Boeing has been under renewed scrutiny after a door plug blew out off an Alaska Airlines plane in January
The door plug was later found in the yard of an Oregon teacher
Potentially more troubling for the company, Mohawk charged that Boeing hid evidence after the Federal Aviation Administration told the company it planned to inspect the plant in June 2023.
The FAA said it would ‘thoroughly investigate’ the allegations. A spokesperson said the agency has received more reports of safety concerns from Boeing employees since the Jan. 5 blowout on the Alaska Airlines Max.
The company’s repeated failure to fix the plentiful problems has led to skepticism on Capitol Hill and lawmakers torched CEO Dave Calhoun for his role in the airline’s downfall Tuesday.
‘Instead of asking what has caused Boeing’s safety culture to erode, you and your colleagues in the C-suite have deflected blame, looked the other way, and catered to your shareholders instead,’ Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said.
‘Boeing needs to stop thinking about the next earning call, and start thinking about the next generation.’