Jennifer Aniston Faced Crippling Fear of Flying During Emergency Landing on 50th Birthday

Jennifer Aniston opened up about her scary experience during an emergency plane landing on her way to Mexico for her 50th birthday.

The Murder Mystery star made headlines back in February when her best friends surprised her with a getaway to Mexico to celebrate the milestone, including Friends co-star Courteney Cox and Jimmy Kimmel’s wife Molly McNeary. The scary situation was exacerbated by the fact Aniston has always had a “real fear of flying.”

“We heard an explosion, which sounded like a pothole if it was a car big enough to go over the Grand Canyon. It was so loud,” Aniston remembered from the plane’s strange takeoff, on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Thursday night. “I have a real fear of flying, obviously, but nobody else does. So Courteney Cox, whose father is a pilot and is never afraid, says, ‘Should we have checked that? Is everything okay?’ They were like, No, no, it’s taxiing, it’s going smoothly.”

The group took off seemingly without a hitch, until a flight attendant asked the actress to go talk to the pilots about two hours into the journey.

“I turned to my best friend and said, ‘Would you go talk to the pilot?’ Because there’s no way this [points at panicked face] is going to go talk to the pilot,’” Aniston recalled. “Then 10 minutes later she comes out and she says, ‘We’ve turned around, we’re actually going back to California. They found some debris from a wheel on the runway. They think it’s from our plane.’”

Aniston remembered the group began to start texting their “spouses and their children and I’m line, ‘What’s going on?’”

The plane later landed safely in Ontario, California and the group got another flight to Cabo San Lucas the next day. The airport revealed later in a statement there were problems with the jet’s landing gear.

“A Gulfstream aircraft with 10 passengers and two flight crew members on board landed without incident at Ontario International Airport (ONT) after experiencing landing gear difficulty,” the statement read, as first reported by PEOPLE.

Cox previously broke her silence on the startling emergency landing, saying she thought something was wrong with the plane from the beginning.

“I’m not afraid of flying at all…my dad was a pilot…but I was really scared, because when we were taking off, we heard this really loud bang and I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds like we should probably check that tire,’” she told Extra back in February.

“There was no tire at all, there was no wheel. Luckily, there are two wheels on each side and two in the front,” she continued. “I have to say, we were in the air for four hours, burning off fuel and just thought of what it is going to be like when we land…it was a really smooth landing.”

Aniston’s latest movie, Murder Mystery co-starring Adam Sandler, will be made available to stream June 12 on Netflix.