stepped up its drug interdiction activities<\/a> in the Caribbean and is also seeking to increase pressure on the Venezuelan government.<\/p>\n\u201cWe just had traffic pass directly in front of us, within 5 miles [8km] of us \u2013 maybe 2 or 3 miles [3 or 5km] \u2013 but it was an air-to air refueller from the United States Air Force, and he was at our altitude,\u201d the pilot said. \u201cWe had to stop our climb.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pilot said the US Air Force plane then headed into Venezuelan airspace.<\/p>\n
Derek Dombrowski, a spokesman for JetBlue, said on Sunday: \u201cWe have reported this incident to federal authorities and will participate in any investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added, \u201cOur crew members are trained on proper procedures for various flight situations, and we appreciate our crew for promptly reporting this situation to our leadership team.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Pentagon referred The Associated Press agency to the Air Force for comment. The Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
The US Federal Aviation Administration last month issued a warning to US aircraft, urging them to \u201cexercise caution\u201d when in Venezuelan airspace, \u201cdue to the worsening security situation and heightened military activity in or around Venezuela\u201d.<\/p>\n
According to the air traffic recording, the controller responded to the JetBlue pilot, \u201cIt has been outrageous with the unidentified aircraft within our air.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The incident involved JetBlue Flight 1112 from Curacao, which is just off the coast of Venezuela, en route…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,1127,12,3140,3,21,19,22,20,25,24,18232],"class_list":["post-349101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-conflict","tag-donald-trump","tag-latin-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}