Passengers on board Alaska Airlines flight 3492, operated by regional partner SkyWest, experienced an unexpected diversion that left many scratching their heads. The flight departed from San Francisco bound for Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but was rerouted to Salt Lake City when the pilot revealed he wasn’t qualified to land at the destination airport.
The flight on August 8th, 2024, seemed routine until it approached its descent into Jackson Hole. As passengers prepared for landing, a passenger reports that the pilot announced:
Hey, I’m really sorry folks but due to me not having the proper qualification to land in Jackson Hole, we need to divert to Salt Lake City, Utah. We’ll keep you posted on the next steps.
The plane then made its way to Salt Lake City, where it remained on the tarmac for about an hour and a half before a new pilot arrived to take over.
The replacement pilot successfully landed the aircraft in Jackson Hole, but not without some added drama. Passengers described the landing as one of the bumpiest they had ever experienced, adding to the overall stress of the situation. By the time they finally arrived, the flight was three hours behind schedule.
The key question that arose from this incident was: How did a pilot end up on a flight to an airport he wasn’t qualified to land at? A scheduling error seems unlikely. Even if the airline made a mistake, along the lines of when American Airlines flew a plane to Hawaii that wasn’t qualified for overwater operations, I fully imagine that the pilot would reject the assignment.
Perhaps not being qualified wasn’t a formal statement, as much as an expression that the captain didn’t feel confident at the controls in the particular wind scenario that later led to a bumpy landing. Jackson Hole is at an elevation of over 6,500 feet and surrounded by the Teton Mountains, and is known for its tricky approaches.
The pilot also may have encountered higher ‘minimums’ than expected on approach to the airport given their qualifications and current conditions at the time of arrival. Clearly a decision was made based on safety, though the communication wasn’t reassuring.
Update: According to SkyWest,
On Thursday, Aug. 8, SkyWest Airlines flight 3491, operating as Alaska Airlines from San Fransisco to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, landed for a short time in Salt Lake City to correct a paperwork error related to the flight crew. The flight continued to Jackson Hole after a delay while a new pilot was secured to operate the flight. All pilots involved were qualified to fly and land the aircraft; the flight diverted from Jackson Hole due to an internal administrative error and out of abundance of caution. We apologize to customers for the inconvenience and are conducting an internal review to ensure a similar situation does not occur in the future.
Safety First , in all things . Bravo for the honest pilot .
I wish that younger boys and girls would follow “Safety First” before dating unsafe people . Better to avoid potential problems from the beginning . Also better to vote for the safer republicans , rather than the unsafe democrats .,
Look, this is an under-reported crisis, but the lack of qualified personnel as pilots, ATC and ground staff?
Stems DIRECTLY from the enforcement of highly-ill-conceived mandates in Late Stage Beer Bug. Long after it was clear that the jabs no longer had much efficacy against the highly-mutated viral strains? Long after the CDC and WHO had stopped recommending the jabs for anyone under 70?
Oh, yeah, the politically-motivated hacks in power decided to use “compliance” as a loyalty test. Thousands were fired and separated from: ATC, Airlines, Police Forces and Military.
We’re short of qualified people and have only this administration’s nonsense policies to blame.
The “near misses” at airports across the country are up 10X…. Does nobody find that strange?
I would have no complaint about a pilot making that call – I prefer being delayed to being an insurance claim. In 1986 (possibly 87), I flew to Tegucigalpa, Honduras on the inaugural Eastern Airlines flight there. The old Toncontin airport (TGU) was a very tricky approach and required pilots to undergo special training before landing there. We tried four approaches, pulling out for a go around each time. The weather wasn’t bad, visibility was good, the pilot just couldn’t make the landing. After the last attempt he diverted to San Pedro Sula (SPS). There the flight crew exited the plane and a crew from Tan Sahsa (the Honduran National Airline at the time) boarded. They flew us back to TGU and landed on the first attempt. I am not faulting the Eastern pilot, he put safety ahead of his pride. That is how it should always be.
LAY DOWN YOUR HEAD- Not sure where you get your info. But, get it someplace else. The CDC hasn’t stopped recommending vaxes for under 70. They recommend it fpr everyone over 6 months….This in their press release from June ’24.
It would seem those madates are to prevent those wth little to no knoweldge what they’re talking about….but pretending they do…. from doing more harm than good.
Thanks to the CDC for the guidance
The FAA recommends that airlines provide special training including and qualifications to land at JAC.
There is nothing heroic about a pilot choosing not to land there if SkyWest follows FAA recommendations – which they most likely do – and the pilot did not have that qualification.
If anything would have happened, the pilot’s career would have ended despite whatever happened to SKYW.
The only question is why the error wasn’t caught long before the flight left the gate in SFO
As a retired AA pilot who has landed there, I can tell you that Jackson Hole was a “special qualification” airport. I believe we had to watch a video and thoroughly review the special airport pages in our Jepps. Other airports (like TGU) require a check airman to fly with a Captain to the airport for their first time going there.
My guess is someone figured out the Skywest Captain had not seen the video. This could be a Flight Ops issue that Crew Scheduling may or may not have been aware of. With lots of new Captains transitioning to the left seat, Skywest may need to take a look at how these Special Qual airports are tracked.
Maybe pilot is not rated for IFR only visual and Jackson Hole visibility was an issue?
@Alert is a moron.
As a passenger, a few airports make me uncomfortable. This is one of them. There are a lot of diversions at JAC from qualified pilots. Weird weather, downhill runway, big mountains and I seem to remember a water feature near the runway. Pilot was honest and nobody should be too upset.
With GPS every aircraft is qualified to fly over water. Hawaii? It’s somewhere southwest of here. Let’s take-off and see what happens.
A sailor simply followed the jet contrails and landed in Waikiki perfectly, 21 days after leaving Marine del Rey.
As far as ditching precautions, just ensure you have enough fuel. I’ve made multiple treks to / from Hawaii in small, single engine aircraft and although the engine may cough, or sputter (causing you to poop in your pants) halfway between there and here (or here and there) – I’ve always made it.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a Swiss flight from ZRH to CPH this morning diverted to HAM. Not sure what happened thereafter, but the next Swiss plane that arrived into CPH came without any passengers.
Probably a high mins Captain….. nothing out of the ordinary and nowhere near dramatic as everyone here is making it out to be. Weather was forecasted to be within his limits at time of arrival………they launch and subsequently find the ACTUAL weather outside of his (or her) mandated limits ending in a diversion … happens all the time.
@momo … Yes , Alert is a moron . He is a Safe moron with No problem entanglements , nor any infatuation with slimy politicians .
@Jim Thurber It has nothing to do with finding Hawaii or running out of fuel. Flying long distances over water requires ETOPS certification. That particular AA aircraft did not have it.
So much silly conjecture. JH is a special qual airport period! Obviously it was determined by the pilot, company or both, the pilot lacked some block of training required. Good call to catch the records error and not a big deal. The FAA will certainly review the Company QA gap. Life goes on better than before.
A good job by the pilot. Regulations change. The pilot was probably certain that he was qualified to land there when he took off but later found that his training didn’t have all of the correct elements. I have flown into and out of that airport once each with fellow ski club members but LAX to SLC was the first flight.
uh, aren’t there two pilots ?
NEITHER was qualified ?
That’s scary
Not “qualified,” or didn’t he weather deteriorate to under personal minimums? It appears the latter from the tweet (very bumpy approach).
We have no direct quote as to what he actually said, just a game of telephone (through social media) from someone who’s not a pilot.
Bravo to this gal or guy for risking the ire of bloggers instead of crashing. A HERO.
As Jerry said, special procedures airport that require the require the captain to complete additional training for this specific airport. No idea how he was assigned to the flight, but he probably noticed when reviewing the approach.
If it was a case of high minimums, the pilot would just say the weather is worse than what is required for him to land.
That is the best trained pilot.zThe opposite is one airlines cheif pilot who had never landed his plane without the use of glide slope. He attempted his first ever landing without it keeping mute, cause it was his check flight. He hit the e sea wall killhig mself and many others because of pride.
@Dan77W
“nothing out of the ordinary”
“happens all the time”
Are you eff’ing kidding? In 4.5 million miles of flying I’ve NEVER had a pilot be “unqualified” to finish a flight he’d started.
@Roman
That’s simply nonsense. At the time the administration was forcing the mandates?
Both CDC and WHO stopped recommending further boosters– and were quite explicit that the current (esp Moderna) booster composition was functionally worthless against the mutated strains.
And, I suppose you are going to re-engineer the past and claim that “there were no mandates”?
And schools weren’t forced closed…
I have to agree with @Roman about the CDC recommendations. I searched on [CDC Recommends Updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 and Flu Vaccines for Fall/Winter Virus Season] and went to the CDC media statement released on June 27, 2024. WHO has some information at [Statement on the antigen composition of COVID-19 vaccines] but I find their website hard to navigate. I think that I have had more friends and family with Covid-19 during the last year than during the three years before that. I will be getting another Covid-19 booster vaccination in the fall along with my yearly flu vaccination.
Christ, these COVID-19 denier shit for brains. Give it a rest. You’re not epidemiologists or doctors.
COVID-19 has myriad and disturbing effects on the body. Blaming the vaccine is ridiculous. It’s far more likely that long term effects of COVID are to blame.
It is true that near misses are up, but we’re also running understaffed all over the place and pushing more and more planes through the system.
This is Un-believable. Why would someone Greenhorn/ Amateur pilot decide to board a plane and choose to fly an aircraft that this dummy can’t properly land. I kinda wonder,what this Dumbass was thinking at all, especially with flying an aircraft that he didn’t have the proper qualifications flying or even landing it at the same time. Those types of Inexperienced/ Amateur pilots shouldn’t be allowed to fly aircrafts until they’ve had the proper training to do their jobs fully because if they don’t,then they are gonna put many travellers at risk
I’m sorry. “Higher minimums”?
Minimums are minimums.
Meaning the lowest allowable.
If anything was higher than minimums it would have been allowed, first of all.
Second of all, minimums are minimums. They don’t change.
If the minimum allowed wind speed is 10knots, for example, then a higher than minimum would be 11 knots, and would be allowed.
A lower than minimum would be 9 knots, and that would not be allowed.
Come on. If you’re writing for a living, how about you get your facts straight?
this has nothing to do with covid, vaccines or high weather minimums.
JAC is a special qualification airport. One or both of the pilots on the flight realized late into the flight that they did not meet SkyWest’s requirements and diverted to SLC.
There is no heroism involved. SKYW scheduling made a mistake in scheduling the pilot(s) on the flight. The pilot was not willing to end his career over SKYW’s scheduling mistake and left the company to figure out how to get the plane and passengers from SLC.
“In 4.5 million miles of flying I’ve NEVER had a pilot be “unqualified” to finish a flight he’d started.”
As far as you know……
Why did the captain accept a trip he wasn’t qualified for? they share part of the blame too
I am about to unsubscribe again. This blog used to bo so nice, and Gary still produces a really informative and interesting blog, however the people who bring in all this off topic comments ruin it.
Look what Tom. Dually wrote above, his first sentence is on topic,
“Look, this is an under-reported crisis, but the lack of qualified personnel as pilots, ATC and ground staff?”
Then 2 paragraphs of just verbal diarrhea, spouting off – off topic- then finishes with a final on topic sentence, “The “near misses” at airports across the country are up 10X…. Does nobody find that strange?”
Gary please reply to people who are ruining your blog via the comments, “This is your first and only warning. Stay on topic or you will be banned.”. I used to subscribe but it got so bad I unsubscribed and didn’t read the blog for a couple of years. I cam across it accidentally and it seemed like comments were cleaned up it so I resubscribed. I have only been reading it again for maybe a month, and I am about to unsubscribe again due to all the off topic comments. It is not enjoyable to have to scroll through all the political crap to read comments on the actual topic. Take your politics and go where you feel comfortable, go comment over there. This is a travel blog, unless you are offering comments on the topic you are being offensive and ruining Gary’s blog. I will give it a few days only, if the comments are not better moderated I will be gone again.
I recently gave feed back to ‘Alaska listens’ where I thought the pilot who was flying did not know what he was doing. The taxiing was erratic, starts and stops. The take off was bad; he didn’t even line up on the runway threshold. He just turned, accelerated and took off. The climb was way too steep. The landing was 2 bounces before we landed. Train your pilots Alaska! (maybe this WAS a training flight).
Jim Thurber obviously knows little about piliting a plane. Oceanic training is almost like learning a new plane. Navagating is the least of it. VHF radio doesnt work past 200 miles. How do you communicate position reports. If you have a major mechanical problem, at what point do you continue or turn back. How do you deal with 300 people if you have to ditch. What if GPS fails. The list goes on and on. Many airports have unique proceedures due to varying reasons Midway, Orange county, Eagle co., Mex City and Jackson Hole are some. There is reasons for airport specific training and it usually involves a past crash. I can fault the captain a bit for aceppting a flight to special airport instead of telling the dispatcher of the situation. I can fault the airline if they didnt tell him it was a special airport. But not landing there and taking the reprocussions is a good move. I was trained to fly to Jackson Hole. It is challenging.
They never tell you the real reason for why something happened. Piloting is a very security related profession, and details not always known to the public. If the first officer is not qualified to do something, the the captain should be, or we would hope so.
@Older Woman
You sound offended, but didn’t actually address any of the substance of my comments about the severe shortage of qualified ATC and pilots currently.
It’s not exactly a secret that thousands of staff were fired or voluntarily terminated due to pressures exerted in late-stage bug. Those numbers are well-reported.
The losses of staff were clearly pointless now that the science is better understood.
Gary’s original post was specifically ABOUT an unqualified pilot who somehow got onto that flight.
If you don’t understand the critical crew shortages in aviation today? Maybe you’re on the wrong blog.
At least pay more attention to the large increase in numbers of “near miss” incidents at our airports. Those are way, way up relative to pre-COVID as well. ATC makes no secret of the severe staff shortages. Induced by mass terminations coming out of COVID.
@David
Huh? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know when I’m delivered to an airport different from the place I’m supposed to be.
On the very rare occasion of a re-routing? Yeah, you know WHY.
In this case? There are questions to ask about how a pilot without qualifications to operate in SKYWEST service locations was even IN the cockpit.
The quality of pilots now flying the commuter segments these days has clearly deteriorated.
The shortage of qualified crew isn’t exactly a state secret.
@Tim Dunn
Once again you seem pretty apologetic for Delta. No surprise there.
But the shortage of qualified crew, notably at Skywest and the other regionals, is a real problem.
And there are real life policy decisions that fostered those crew shortages.
Relative to Delta’s terrible regional carrier?
I was on a DL Skywest flight out of LAX recently that was barely airworthy. (Broken lav, non-functional APU, no ground AC). It’s probably time to ask how bad Skywest will get before your keepers in Atlanta figure it out.
@Tom Dually
No bueno.
This what you wrote was completely OFF TOPIC,
“Stems DIRECTLY from the enforcement of highly-ill-conceived mandates in Late Stage Beer Bug. Long after it was clear that the jabs no longer had much efficacy against the highly-mutated viral strains? Long after the CDC and WHO had stopped recommending the jabs for anyone under 70?
Oh, yeah, the politically-motivated hacks in power decided to use “compliance” as a loyalty test. Thousands were fired and separated from: ATC, Airlines, Police Forces and Military.
We’re short of qualified people and have only this administration’s nonsense policies to blame.”
Nobody wants to hear your political comments. Nobody. You should have went with your opening and closing sentence and be done. If I were Gary I would give you one warning and then ban you.
It is exactly word for word, comments like yours that drove me off of this blog. I Do.Not.Want.To.Hear your political opinions. The pandemic was 4 years ago, get over it already, get a life. All your comments about the “jab” and a highly mutated virus ARE not about the topic.
I am an KJAC qualified captain at SKW. Qualifications require a line check into and out of Jackson in addition to instruction and review of a special airport briefing guide. Quite possible a lower time non qualified captain picked up the trip without recognizing the qualification requirements. Normally that oversight would be picked up by crew scheduling. In any event, better to divert than to land at an airport you’re not qualified to go into.
@Older Woman
Again you seem upset by the facts. And anyone using “verbal diarrhea” (especially in a written forum!) as a descriptor probably isn’t worth listening to. But the fact is we’re short about 17,000 pilots in the US at the present time. We’re short because a lot of qualified people were fired/discharged pointlessly. I’ll just attach the actual reporting (see below) and leave it there.
I trust the Airline CEO’s assessment of the situation more than I do yours.
Have a nice day.
*****
According to a 2022 CBS News report, U.S. airlines had hoped to add 13,000 pilots last year while the mandate was still being challenged in court. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said at the time, “The pilot shortage for the industry is real and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plan because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five plus years.”
This year, the gap between supply and demand for U.S. pilots increased to 17,000 unfilled positions, or 15% of the workforce, The Berkshire Eagle reported. “Nearly 50 percent of the commercial airline workforce will retire in the next 15 years,” it reports. “Unless things change, prospects are dim that supply and demand for this vital workforce can come back into balance any time soon.” ******
@jns
“I have to agree with @Roman about the CDC recommendations. I searched on [CDC Recommends Updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 and Flu Vaccines for Fall/Winter Virus Season] and went to the CDC media statement released on June 27, 2024. WHO has some information at [Statement on the antigen composition of COVID-19 vaccines] but I find their website hard to navigate. I think that I have had more friends and family with Covid-19 during the last year than during the three years before that. I will be getting another Covid-19 booster vaccination in the fall along with my yearly flu vaccination”
Who cares? Your comment doesn’t have anything to do with the topic. Stay on topic. a TRAVEL Blog topic.
That’s a lot of speculation for a news article… enough to make me not trust further stories I may see from this source. Do better.
Jackson Hole is a special qualification airport, deemed so by the FAA. It is challenging, and has very thorough preparation guides. To boot, it’s a Captain only landing. First officers are not authorized to land at Jackson Hole. To get certified, a captain must fly with a Check Airman into Jackson Hole, after completing a very in depth verbal brief. It is entirely possible to be 100% qualified to fly that plane, yet NOT be qualified to land in Jackson Hole, simply because they haven’t gotten checked out yet. It was certainly a scheduling error, and the Captain did not realize until they had already departed that Jackson Hole was a special qualification airport. Fault on both company and crew.
The captain made the right move to rectify the problem. The bit about the bumpy landing is clearly sensationalized “news”. It’s the summertime… in a mountainous airport… if you don’t like the bumps, don’t fly during summer.
It’s already been pointed out that Jackson Hole is a designated Special Pilot in Command Qualification Airport.
Google 14 CFR §121.445
There are many special airports that SKYWEST services.
Back in the good old days (TWA 707) before we upgraded to Captain we had to make an actual visit to the airport as a jumpseat rider. This got expensive and Jeppesen, the airlines’ chart provider, convinced FAA to use pictorial means. In the beginning, it was a 35mm film of the approaches in visual conditions that later morphed into Jepp publishing Special Pages for an airport.
You know it’s a special when you look at the approach charts and the last ones are the “pictorial means.”
Most airlines have dedicated pages with all of that airlines’ operational issues. Such as where the ops office is to airplane specific instructions.
I just checked one and it has this notation:
“Supervised Operation Requirements See FOM>Currencies and Qualifications.”
Perhaps the pilot read the Flight Operations Manual enroute and discovered the was unqualified.
Tom,
you and ONLY YOU have mentioned Delta in this conversation.
SKYW flies for all 4 of the airlines that operate regional jets in the US – AA, AS, DL and UA.
I doubt very seriously if any of their aircraft flying for any of those 4 airlines is in danger of being unairworthy – but thanks for showing your bias by dragging an airline that wasn’t even part of the discussion into it so you could trash them.
Sort of destroys whatever credibility you might have had given how much you have commented on this article
Jackson Hole is one of a number of airports that are considered “special qualification.” This means, depending on the air carrier, that pilots must meet certain training requirements specific to that airport, which can range from simple approach chart annotations, to supplementary information disseminated to all pilots, or watching a video. In some cases, a pilot must receive training from a check airman on the aircraft into the special airport.
It’s likely this pilot was assigned to this trip and was not aware of the special qualification requirement until after departure. Mistakes like this happen, and the wise choice was to be compliant with rule, and land elsewhere.
Not “shocking.”
There are ao many qualifications to keep track of that Pilots rely on computer systems to tell them if they have done certain kinds of landings or other events recently enough to be qualified to do them again at that time.
The reason he shared it with the passengers is because it was really no big deal. He could’ve landed it fine but the computer system told him he couldn’t. The real question is why the scheduling system messed up. Perhaps the weather conditions changed in route.
When passengers react with fear for something simple like this it adds to the case of why the pilot shouldn’t share anything with the passengers
@Tim Dunn
Heh. You really think that we don’t KNOW who flies that route to JAC, and that the pilot who returned to station at SLC WASN’T driving the bus on a R/J sold as a DELTA flight? Cmon man. You’re better than that.
It was a Delta flight. Get down off your high horse.
And, no, I don’t think the pilot’s a martyr for figuring out he was unqualified EN ROUTE. It’s all pathetic mis-direction. How can such a thing happen?
I believe, as other commenters have mentioned, that the degradation and pilot qualifications and training is especially obvious at Skyworst these days. Missed approaches, hard landings, missed taxiways.
We’re 17,000 pilots short across the industry in the US. The first place that’s showing up is in the commuter airlines. You guys can deny that all you want, but there’s no doubt in the data.
The Flight I’m complaining about? Non-working APU used to be an automatic scrub if it happened pre-departure. In this case all the Skywest staff did was wave their hands at it and pretend that we didn’t notice the 130 degree temps due to “no AC”. No APU. Lav doesn’t work.
“Sure, have a great flight! Let’s pray all the spinny bits keep spinning so we don’t need to fire up the dead APU!’
Cynically? The only reason they flew the flight is because the destination also hosts a big Skywest maintenance base. Delta just took the opportunity to torture the self-loading cargo some more by selling tickets on a plane that would have been taken from service if this had happened 10 years ago. It’s a profitable dead-head to be taken out of service after the sweltering pax are dragged off the plane.
And they did take the equipment out of service. I stayed around long enough to see ground staff drag the PoS over to the maintenance base.
Since this occurred three days ago, it was easy to check the National Weather Service almanac for KJAC. Appears weather wasn’t a factor. So, probably a case of the PIC being non-qualified for KJAC operations. As to the why it wasn’t flagged prior to departure, who knows….we can only speculate.
All that said, the commenter @Dan77W makes a good point (just one that may not be relevant to this particular case). It is VERY possible to have destination weather deteriorate while enroute whereby the PIC is unable to conduct a landing because he/she has not yet been trained (qualified) to conduct operations below his/her weather minima.
I just want to take a moment to say “thank you” to all the commenters who work tirelessly to make every article ultimately about politics.
It’s thankless work, but it’s really, really important to make sure that ultimately we do not discuss the article and instead use this space to air our political grievances.
If you are really, really stuck on finding an angle to make an article about politics, just remember two things:
1) Making things political is the most important thing, so if your comment has to be a complete non-sequitur, well, so be it.
2) As long as the article, in some manner, references a mistake, and we don’t have a picture of the mistake-makers, you can always blame it on DEI.
As a captain and check pilot myself, a couple things come to mind. 1.) Jackson Hole is a special qualification airport and the Capt may not have had the appropriate qualifications to go, which is highly unlikely SkyWest is good at knowing who to go and not go.
What I truly believe happened is the weather was bad and the low time Capt had higher approach minimums then normal. Therefore, as they approached the airport they weren’t even legal to begin the approach.
Kudos for the captain to divert but I would have told the passengers something else so this story wouldn’t have ended up on the Internet. 😀