An “emergency landing” of a charter flight of armed services members Monday evening at Tallahassee International Airport briefly closed the airport’s runway and led to the diversion of one flight back to a Texas airport.
Passengers on a flight headed to Florida’s capital were stuck scrambling for a hotel or spending the night on the floor or in stiff chairs at the Dallas Forth Worth International Airport after being unable to land in Tallahassee.
Just minutes before landing, which was supposed to be around 10 p.m. on Aug. 11, the Tallahassee-bound plane was informed both runways were closed for landing and it had to turn around, said John Matthews, a passenger. The pilot came on over the intercom and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Tallahassee airport is closed.”
The plane was forced to make the three-and-a-half hour trip back to the Texas airport, getting in around midnight, Matthews said: “It’s been unbelievable.”
With no official notice from airport officials on social media or otherwise, reports of fire trucks and paramedics on the runways were bouncing around social media. One person posted that the incident was because a chartered flight full of military personnel returning from a month-long stint in California had a mishap during landing.
Tallahassee’s Deputy Director of Aviation Vanessa Spaulding confirmed that account in an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat. Spaulding said the charter flight’s final destination was intended to be Tallahassee, but around 9 p.m., the pilots – who were transporting National Guard members – called in requesting “an emergency landing” due to the plane experiencing hydraulic issues.
She said the airport immediately coordinated and communicated very closely with its airline partners. From there the airline is supposed to communicate with its passengers.
“This is what we do, we handle things like this and diversions on the daily,” she said. “We’re trained for this; our team executed the training exceptionally … I think our team did an exceptional job. It was an overwhelmingly positive response from our team.”
Passengers, however, said they were in the dark.
When they landed in Texas, Matthews said that the airline blamed the Tallahassee International Airport for the mix-up and wouldn’t provide them with vouchers for food or lodging, so they had to pay out of pocket.
“The hotel here in the airport is $400 a night, so I said to heck with that and took an Uber to a Motel 6,” Matthews said.
Matthews said he thinks the Tallahassee International Airport has “some explaining to do” because “nobody seemed to know what was going on.”
Passengers later learned that one runway was shut down due to construction and the second was closed because the disabled plane was stuck on the tarmac.
As of 10:40 a.m. Tuesday, nearly 80 people were still waiting in Texas to return to Tallahassee after a long sleepless night. Matthews said they were given little information about what happened and after they landed the pilots and flight attendants walked off without a word.
The runway was cleared in roughly an hour and a half, Spalding said, and no one was injured. “While it was unfortunate and inconvenient for the passengers, the good news is that the plane landed 181 passengers and crew safely, and we’re very, very proud of our team’s response.”
The FAA is investigating the incident that occurred on a plane belonging to Eastern Airlines, a carrier that ceased operations in 1991 but later was reborn to focus on charter and cargo services.
The passenger on social media wrote that the charter plane made a “harder-than-usual landing” and that they “almost ran out of runway and ran into the perpendicular runway for other planes.”
He said the plane sat on the runway for over two hours and no explanation was given until an hour in when the pilots informed them that the tires were to hot to move and had to cool down. “Long night, but everyone is OK,” he wrote.
Before details of the “emergency landing” became clear, the lack of notice drew fire from Red Tape Florida, a website run by former Tallahassee Democrat publisher Skip Foster, who now heads Hammerhead Communications, a public relations firm.
The blog site, which does not reveal its clients, has been a consistent critic of the airport in its mission of “shining a light on the good, bad and ugly” of bureaucracy in Florida.
“You might think an airport with 58 full-time employees and a $19 million budget would be able to tell the public what was going on,” the Red Tape Florida article says. “You would be wrong.”
Local government watchdog reporter Elena Barrera can be reached at ebarrera@tallahassee.com. Follow her on X: @elenabarreraaa.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Tallahassee airport: ‘Emergency landing’ closes runway, diverts flight
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