Cockpit Audio Records Plane's Close Call With Speeding 'Cylindrical Object'
By Dave Basner
February 23, 2021
Pilots are always aware of their surroundings, whether it is storm clouds, mountainous terrain or nearby planes, but the captain at the helm of American Airlines flight 2292 on Sunday saw something he's never seen before, and the audio of him radioing it in to air traffic control has people wondering about it too.
It happened as the Airbus A320 he was piloting made its way from Cincinnati to Phoenix. At 36,000 feet over the remote northeast corner of New Mexico, while traveling at around 460 miles-per-hour, the captain calls in to Albuquerque Air Traffic Control and asks, "Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us." In the radio transmission, which was acquired by the Deep Black Horizon blog, the pilot adds, "I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type thing, moving really fast right over the top of us."
The Deep Black Horizon blog reports there were no military aircraft in the area at the time, which was about 1 p.m, and neither the Federal Aviation Authority nor American Airlines commented to the Daily Mail on if the audio is authentic or not.
Stranger still is that this isn't the first time an incident like this has occurred in that same area. About three years ago, two pilots in different planes both reported encountering a strange flying object above them. A Learjet captain radioed in while flying over Arizona, asking, "Was anybody above us that passed us like 30 seconds ago?" and an Airbus pilot chimed in, "Yeah, something just passed over us, like a - I don't know what it was, but it was at least two, three thousand feet above us. Yeah, it passed right over the top of us." The tower told them no aircrafts were in that area.
One of those pilots went on to describe the object saying, "Couldn't make it out whether it was a balloon or whatnot. But it was just really beaming light or could have had a big reflection and was several thousand feet above us going opposite direction... It was very bright but it wasn’t so bright that you couldn’t look at it… It didn’t look anything like an airplane. You know, most airplanes, you’re going to see some kind of wing surface, some type of a tail, really no matter what type of airplane it is. What was weird about it, normally, if you have an object and the sun is shining this way, the reflection would be on this side, but this was bright all the way around. It was so bright that you really couldn’t make out what shape it was."
As for Sunday's flight, it went on to land in Phoenix safely and without any issues.
Photo: Getty Images