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

“I’m glad I didn’t know what was going on,” Amy Giannotti said.

[ Courtesy of Amy Giannotti ]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. 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. 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.

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