ESPN's Brian Windhorst involved in flight that made emergency landing

ESPN‘s Brian Windhorst was involved in a scary situation on a flight from Omaha to Los Angeles Monday night.

The American Airlines flight that Windhorst and many others were aboard had to make an emergency landing after a failure disrupted communications. Windhorst detailed the situation on Tuesday across multiple outlets.

Brian Windhorst might be the best storyteller in America. This is a truly captivating story about the American Airlines flight he was on that had to make an emergency landing earlier this week due to suspected terrorist activity. pic.twitter.com/SBNTYj0XN7

— Steven Cheah (@StevenCheah) October 22, 2025

“About 10 minutes into the flight, all of a sudden we took a very hard U-turn,” Windhorst said. “Right as we’re doing the U-turn, I’m like ‘this ain’t right.’ We’re supposed to head west. California is west into the sunset. We’re turning around heading east and we’re no longer going up.”

“So I’m like ‘something’s going on.’ But right as I was trying to sign onto the WiFi, it said how many minutes was left on the flight. It should have been like three hours and 15 minutes, but instead it said 14 minutes. And so I knew they had already changed the flight computer and I knew we were going back to the airport.”

Windhorst reveals that no announcements were made to flight

Per Windy, the failing communications could not allow the pilots to communicate with the flight attendants. Because of this misunderstanding, the pilots reportedly radioed in that people were banging on the cockpit when it was just flight attendants trying to communicate with the pilots. After this situation, the plane promptly returned to Eppley Airfield as a ‘precautionary measure’.

“This was an unusual situation,” he continued in an interview with KETV NewsWatch 7. “There were no announcements whatsoever and I honestly think that the people who were the most nervous were the flight attendants and the pilot because they were the ones that knew something was wrong. I think the stress for the passengers was having the plane pull off with no communication and having police officers board.”

Windhorst, who has been with ESPN since 2010, was heading to Los Angeles for the Lakers’ season opener against the Golden State Warriors Tuesday night. Windhorst has extensively covered LeBron James since he was drafted into the NBA in 2003. James however missed his first career season opener Tuesday night due to sciatica.