Blown Tires Force Airplane Back To Austin Airport (Updated)

LEANDER, TEXAS — A Delta aircraft headed from Austin to Minneapolis and Detroit blew some tires upon takeoff on Monday evening, forcing its return to the local airport.

A Leander storm chaser calling himself StormChaserMark posted video of the aircraft flying at at 3,000 feet with its landing gear down some 30 miles from the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

"Just saw this fly over my place 30 miles away from the airport at 3,000 feet with its landing gear down," he wrote in a tweet posted at around 7:30 p.m. "I’m guessing some kind of emergency!"

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport spokesman Derick Hackett told Patch the incident involved Delta flight 2867 that was headed from Austin to Minneapolis and Detroit before experiencing blown tires upon takeoff.

The incident was characterized as a so-called Alert 2 situation, a code denoting a wide range of commercial aircraft malfunction, the spokesman offered. An Alert 3 would be a crash, he added. The number of passengers on the plane at the time was unknown, but Hackett said they would likely have been transferred to another aircraft or provided other accommodations per standard protocol.

A message left with Lynn Lunsford, spokesman for the Southwest region of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in efforts to secure details was not immediately returned.