FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — At least 15 JetBlue passengers were injured and taken to the hospital after a sudden drop in altitude on a flight from Mexico forced an emergency landing in Florida, officials said Friday.
The Thursday flight from Cancun was headed to Newark, New Jersey, when the altitude dropped. The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane was diverted to Tampa International Airport around 2 p.m. “after the crew experienced a flight control issue.”
“We will conduct a full investigation to determine the cause,” JetBlue said in a statement. The FAA says it is also investigating.
Medical personnel met the passengers and crew on the ground at the airport. Between 15 and 20 people were taken to hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, according to Vivian Shedd, a spokesperson for Tampa Fire Rescue.
JetBlue says it has taken the aircraft, an Airbus A320, out of service for inspection. The plane has 162 seats, according to the airline’s website. It wasn’t immediately known how many people were on board.
Pilots reported “a flight control issue” and described injuries including a possible “laceration in the head,” according to air traffic audio recorded by LiveATC.net.
Pablo Rojas, a Miami-based attorney who specializes in aviation law, said a “flight control issue” indicates that the aircraft wasn’t responding to the pilots.
“When they’re making inputs, they’re pulling on things, they’re pushing on things, and the aircraft isn’t responding the way they want it to or the way it should, that is a flight control issue,” he said. “That’s what makes it very scary.”
Rojas, who is part of a team of lawyers representing relatives of victims killed in a deadly 2019 crash of a Boeing 737 Max jet in Ethiopia, said JetBlue, Airbus and federal regulators will likely be taking a close look at whether issues with the plane’s software system caused the plane to suddenly drop.
A new flight-control software system that Boeing developed for its Max jets was blamed for two crashes, including the Ethiopia crash, which happened less than five months after a Max jet went down off the coast of Indonesia in 2018. The crashes killed 346 people.
In both of those crashes, the software had pitched the nose of the then-new planes down repeatedly based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots flying for Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines were unable to regain control.
“When an aircraft loses a lot of altitude against the wishes and apparently against the inputs of the pilots, and the pilots aren’t able to keep the aircraft level, we’ve seen what the tragic consequences of that can be,” Rojas said.
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