Editor's note: The above video is from Jim Tomsula's media availability on June 10, 2015.
Everything was routine as commercial pilot Christina Kurowicki prepared to land on Runway 30-L at San Jose Mineta International Airport on March 26, 2015.
She had been flying in and out of SJC as a corporate pilot for a Silicon Valley Tech company since 2011.
Stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Bay Area and California sports teams! Sign up here for our All Access Daily newsletter.
It as about 8:30pm at night, past sunset but before midnight. As she guided the Gulfstream 550 toward the ground, the light hit her.
“At first I couldn’t really tell where it was coming from,” Kurowicki said. “We just knew that we were getting beams of light in our eye.”
Bright light flooded the cockpit, impairing her night vision and making it difficult to see outside. The beams were so bright, Kurowicki said, that it felt like a laser event. She could only look outside for moments at a time.
“The captain I was flying with noticed where it was coming from and we heard other pilots in the area complaining about the lights coming from the stadium,” Kurowicki said. “And at that point all we were really worried about was getting the aircraft on the ground safely.”
San Francisco 49ers
The lights were from Levi’s Stadium, which sits right in the flight path of runway 30-L.
“It was blinding. It was blinding,” said Kurowicki. “Incapacitating for sure.” Kurowicki and her captain had to work together to land the plane safely. She focused on the instruments while the captain did his best to look for air traffic.
“I was kind of mad,” Kurowicki said. “We got on the ground and put the airplane away and wrote our reports and as we were sitting there we were just pretty fumed.”
READ MORE AT NBCBayArea.com