Пилот JetBlue свихнулся во время полёта
HOUSTON — The captain of a JetBlue flight from New York to Las Vegas suffered a bizarre midair breakdown on Tuesday morning, forcing passengers to restrain him as the plane made an emergency landing in Amarillo, Tex., where he was removed from the aircraft and hospitalized.
Passengers said the captain of Flight 191 was acting erratically outside the cockpit and could be heard shouting about Al Qaeda and bombs being aboard.
Gabriel Schonzeit, a passenger seated in the third row, told The Amarillo Globe-News that about two hours outside Las Vegas, the captain left the cockpit.
“It seemed that something was off with him,” Mr. Schonzeit said in a video clip posted on the newspaper’s Web site, adding, “Within a short period of time, he started screaming about Al Qaeda and possibly a bomb on the plane and Iraq and Iran and how we’re all going down.”
Mr. Schonzeit said a former corrections officer “choked him and took him down, and about six of us went and sat on top of him.”
A JetBlue spokeswoman said the company would not release the captain’s name or condition out of respect for crew members’ privacy. The spokeswoman, Allison Steinberg, said the captain had experienced a “medical situation,” but declined to elaborate.
The captain’s behavior was reminiscent of another embarrassing moment for the airline, when a flight attendant, Steven Slater, opened a plane’s emergency chute, grabbed a beer from the beverage cart and slid down to the tarmac at Kennedy Airport in New York in August 2010 after a dispute with a passenger who stood up before the seat belt light had been turned off.
On Tuesday, Flight 191 left Kennedy at 7:28 a.m. with 135 passengers and six crew members, one of whom was off duty. A spokeswoman for the federal Transportation Security Administration said the co-pilot became concerned as the flight was under way that the captain “exhibited erratic behavior.” The captain left the cockpit during the flight, and the co-pilot locked the door, according to the statement.
The captain tried to re-enter the locked cockpit, but his security code appeared to have changed, and he was seen banging on the door and could be heard demanding to be let back inside, passengers said. It was then that passengers subdued him, the authorities said.
The co-pilot diverted to Amarillo while the off-duty pilot took over the captain’s duties. The plane landed at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport at 10:11 a.m., and the captain was taken by ambulance to a local hospital, the authorities said.
Passengers got off the plane, and waited to board another one to Las Vegas. Many were headed to the International Security Conference West, sponsored by the Security Industry Association. The men who subdued the captain, several of whom are former or current security professionals and law enforcement officers, used their belts to tie his arms.
“I felt if he got in the cockpit, he was going to try to take that plane down, and not for a safe landing,” Paul Babkitis, a retired police officer, told CNN.
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Originally Posted by Astrix
