The captain of a JetBlue flight from New York to Las Vegas suffered a bizarre midair breakdown yesterday morning, forcing passengers to restrain him as the plane made an emergency landing in Amarillo, Texas, where he was hospitalised.
Passengers said the captain of Flight 191 was seen acting erratically outside the cockpit and could be heard shouting about al-Qaeda and bombs being aboard the plane.
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," she said in a video clip posted on the newspaper's website. "I think it was some sort of anxiety disorder or something. 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."
Ms Schonzeit said a former corrections officer on board "choked him and took him down, and about six of us went and sat on top of him".
In a statement, a JetBlue spokeswoman said the company would not release the captain's name or condition out of respect for the privacy of crew members. The spokeswoman aid the captain had experienced a "medical situation", but declined to elaborate.
The captain's behaviour was reminiscent of another embarrassing moment for the airline involving a crew member, when a flight attendant named 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 August 2010 after getting into a dispute with a passenger who stood up before the seat belt light had been turned off.
Yesterday, Flight 191 left Kennedy Airport at 7.28am 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 behaviour."
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 when the captain tried to re-enter the cockpit that passengers subdued him, the authorities said.
The co-pilot then diverted to Amarillo while the off-duty pilot took over the captain's duties. The plane landed at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport at 10.11am, and the captain was taken by ambulance to an Amarillo hospital, the authorities and witnesses 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, at one point 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 who was among those who helped restrain the captain, told CNN.
The New York Times