Taylor Swift performs onstage during Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour at Levis Stadium on July 28, 2023, in Santa Clara, California. (Jeff Kravitz/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)LOS ANGELES – A Taylor Swift fan on a Southwest Airlines flight was not able to get tickets to the pop-superstar’s Southern California concerts as part of the acclaimed Eras Tour, so she asked the pilot to help her get a bird’s eye glimpse of the “Blank Space” singer in action.
Surprisingly, the pilot was agreeable to the plan.
In a now viral video posted to TikTok, Samantha Meany, who uses the handle @idkitssammy, was seen going to the pilot in the cockpit during a layover.
The video, which has received more than 7.4 million views, was posted on Thursday, on the first of Swift’s six sold-out shows at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood outside LA.
Meany casually greeted the pilot with a “knock knock,” told him that she was studying the flight path to their Los Angeles Airport (LAX) destination and asked if they might be going over Inglewood.
The pilot responded, “It depends on which runway they clear us to land on. But either way, we’re going to be close to being right over Inglewood.”
Meany continued to explain, “The Taylor Swift concert is happening right there, right now, and I think that it’d be super cool if we fly over it.”
She shared that she wasn’t able to get tickets to Swift’s SoFi performances and hoped to get a view. “So that’s what I’m going to be looking for,” Meany told the pilot.
The two continued on with a pleasant exchange during which he noticed a festive headband on the woman and asked her if it was her birthday. The soon-to-be 29-year-old was then invited to take a seat and photo in the cockpit.
Later, after landing at LAX, she provided an update on whether they did indeed go over SoFi. “Yes, we did fly directly over it,” Meany explained, but sadly, there was no Taylor sighting.
Meany shared a photo of her disappointing view. “It was still kind of cool to see it, but yeah, I was not aware the stadium had a roof,” she said. “So all we really got to see of the concert was all of the traffic.”
She also said that she shared with the pilot some of the comments from people who had seen her earlier post. And she used the update to clarify the misunderstanding from those who thought the exchange between her and the pilot had happened mid-flight.
“Okay, so it was two flights with a layover, but we didn’t get off the plane for the layover,” she explained, saying the conversation happened during downtime before the next flight.
Southwest Airlines told KTVU it could not validate the authenticity of the post but that its passengers do not dictate flight plans, and as the pilot explained in the video, the alleged fly-over was due to the fact that the flight was assigned a particular runway.
“We’re happy that the pre-planned flight path coincidentally passed over the venue and that our Customer made a terrific memory while traveling with us,” a Southwest representative said.
For Meany, while she didn’t get to an “All Too Well” view of the Grammy Award-winning artist, she did come away with a message fit for a Taylor Swift song.
“Ask for things that you want,” she said. “The worst thing people are going to say is no.”
