The pilot told passengers that he made an “aggressive maneuver” to avoid a military aircraft over North Dakota. The Air Force said a B-52 was conducting a flyover at a state fair at the time.

The pilot of a SkyWest Airlines plane told his passengers during a flight last week that he made an “aggressive maneuver” to avoid hitting a larger military aircraft near a North Dakota airport, according to a recording of his remarks that a passenger made in the cabin and shared with The New York Times.

SkyWest said in a brief statement on Sunday that Flight 3788 from Minneapolis to Minot, N.D., had aborted a landing on Friday because another aircraft was in its flight path.

The plane landed safely soon after the avoidance maneuver. A log on Flightradar24, an aviation tracker, showed the plane descending toward Minot International Airport but then climbing, turning right and flying in a loop before landing. SkyWest did not say how close the two planes had come to each other, and it did not respond to repeated questions.

Minot International is near the Minot Air Force Base and the North Dakota State Fair, an event that began on Friday and featured B-52 bomber flyovers. The base said in a statement on Monday that a B-52 from the base was conducting a flyover at the fairgrounds on Friday evening, with approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and Minot International’s air traffic control tower.

“The tower did not advise of the inbound commercial aircraft,” the base said. Its statement did not name SkyWest Airlines or the B-52 coming close to another plane. The U.S. Air Force did not respond to inquiries.

Flight records show that a B-52 was flying around Minot for part of the time that Flight 3788, a much smaller Embraer jet, was in the area.

The passenger who made the recording, Monica Green, said in an interview that she was sitting near the front of the plane when it swerved “harshly” to the right near the end of the trip. The turn was so sharp that she found herself looking out the window, not at the sky, but at the cornfields below, she said.

“My plane keeps circling and not landing,” Ms. Green texted her husband at the time, according to a screenshot of their conversation.

After the plane landed at Minot International, she said, the pilot came into the cabin and told the passengers that he had turned to avoid hitting a military aircraft. She said the mood felt eerily calm.

“Sorry about the aggressive maneuver,” a man Ms. Green said was the pilot can be heard saying in the video recording she made. “It caught me by surprise. This is not normal at all.”

The air traffic control tower at the airport does not have radar, the pilot says in the video, but a nearby Air Force base does. “I don’t know why they didn’t give us a heads up,” he says. “Because the Air Force base does have radar, and nobody said, ‘Hey, there’s also a B-52 in the pattern.’”

The passenger plane was an Embraer E175. The E175s in SkyWest’s fleet are configured with 70 or 76 seats. Ms. Green estimated that there were about 60 people on board.

The F.A.A. said in a statement that it was investigating the episode.

“Air traffic services were provided by the Minot air traffic control tower, which is run by a private company,” the agency said. “These controllers are not F.A.A. employees.”

Minot International did not respond to requests for comment. SkyWest said in its statement that it was investigating what happened.

SkyWest is based in Utah and operates flights for Delta Air Lines and other major U.S. carriers; Flight 3788 is a Delta code-share. Its Delta flights include daily flights from Detroit, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City. Delta referred questions about the episode to SkyWest.

After the midair scare, Ms. Green, a merchandise manager who lives in Texas, received an email from Delta saying that it was “fully supporting a review of what occurred,” according to a screenshot of the email.

Ms. Green, who flew to Minot because one of her artists was playing at the state fair, said in a phone interview early Monday that she still felt shaken up and confused about what had happened. She said it seemed particularly odd that the planes had nearly collided in “wide open sky.”

“I haven’t had time to think about what could have happened if this pilot hadn’t made this decision,” she said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5754359&forum_id=2Reputation#49129227)