14 DAY TRIAL // A message by the pilot, announcing that the plane was crashing, caused massive panic among passengers on a Southwest Airlines plane.
"He said, we're going down. And everyone is looking around like, is this a joke? Is he serious? And then you felt the nosedive," passenger Shelley Wills tells WTVD.
The plane was headed for the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, coming in from Tampa. Right after the initial announcement that didn't quite sound like an announcement, the aircraft nosedived.
Passengers thought that it would be the end for them, but they were proven wrong. The plane landed safely and all travelers are safe.
Wills mentions the person standing next to her having an anxiety attack and clutching her chest.
"I'm thinking oh my God, she's going to scare herself into a heart attack," Wills recalls.
Passengers were terrified enough to say their final goodbyes. All were pulling out their cellphones, and she tried to send text messages to her daughter and her husband.
"It says I love you Alyssa. My plane is going down.
"I thought I was going to die and that's what everyone on that plane thought. That we were all going to die, just by one word of the captain. I just think they could have handled it a little differently," she says.
It turned out to be a false alarm, as a "maintenance alert" went off by mistake. When Flight 3426 descended to 25,000 feet (7,600 meters), the alert was resolved.
The Boeing 737 made a safe descent and the pilot was able to perform an emergency landing at RDU.
"Throughout the remainder of the descent the flight was normal, landed uneventfully, and was not met by emergency vehicles," the airline says in a statement.
Wills suggests that the crew have not addressed the ominous alert.
"And the last words were thank you for hanging with us," she remembers.