High-Rise Office Workers Say Jet Just Missed Building

Workers on the top floors a downtown San Diego high-rise said Friday that an America West jetliner came dangerously close to the roof of their building before landing at Lindbergh Field, but aviation authorities and airline executives said they were unaware of a close call.

The plane came within either a few dozen or a few hundred feet of the top of the 34-story Symphony Towers office building-hotel complex about 2:45 p.m. Friday, witnesses inside the structure said. “I saw an airplane almost scrape our roof with its underside,” one of the witnesses said.

An America West spokesman, however, said the airline has “absolutely no report of any irregular operations.” Officials at Lindbergh Field and with the Federal Aviation Administration said they, too, had no reports of a plane off the normal flight path or in trouble.

Jerry Acosta, the FAA duty officer in Los Angeles, said air traffic control officials at the Lindbergh tower said an America West plane landed about that time “and it circled to descend, but they didn’t report anything unusual.”

America West Flight 859 from Las Vegas landed at Lindbergh Field about 2:40 p.m., said Dick Shimizu, an airline spokesman at its headquarters in Phoenix. But, he said, “As far as we can tell right now, that plane was on pattern.”

The usual Lindbergh flight path puts planes seven or eight blocks north of Symphony Towers, a new building, as well as the rest of downtown San Diego. Approaching from the east, planes land to the west at the airport.

The tower shares the entire block between 7th and 8th avenues and A and B streets with the Copley Symphony Hall and a 15-story Marriott Suites hotel. The symphony hall is sandwiched between the hotel on the north and the taller office building on the south.