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Pilot loses his cool in the air
Screaming “They’re going to take us down!” a JetBlue pilot stormed through his plane rambling about a bomb and threats from Iraq on Tuesday until passengers on the Las Vegas-bound flight tackled him to the ground just outside the cockpit, passengers said.
The captain of JetBlue Airways Flight 191 from New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport was taken to a hospital after suffering a “medical situation” on board that forced the co-pilot to take over the plane and land it in Amarillo, Texas, the airline said.
The unidentified pilot seemed disoriented, jittery and constantly sipped water when he first marched through the cabin, then began to rant about threats linked to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan after crew members tried to calm him down in the back, passengers said.
“They’re going to take us down. They’re taking us down. They’re going to take us down. Say the Lord’s prayer. Say the Lord’s prayer,” the captain screamed, according to passenger Tony Antolino.
Josh Redick, who was sitting near the middle of the plane, said the captain seemed “irate” and was “spouting off about Afghanistan and souls and Al-Qaeda”.
The outburst came weeks after an American Airlines flight attendant was taken off a plane for rambling about 9/11 and her fears the plane would crash. An aviation expert remembered only two or three cases in 40 years where a pilot had become mentally incapacitated during a flight.
Copy of ND Flight Disrupted-Captain~1
Authorities board JetBlue flight 191 after an emergency landing when an unruly pilot caused the Las Vegas-bound flight to be diverted.
AP
Gabriel Schonzeit, who was sitting in the third row, said the captain said there could be a bomb on board the flight.
“He started screaming about Al-Qaeda and possibly a bomb on the plane and Iraq and Iran and about how we were all going down,” Schonzeit said.
The captain was tackled by several passengers after he tried to re-enter the cockpit, which had been locked by the co-pilot, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
Antolino, a security executive who said he sat in the 10th row, said he and three others pinned down the captain as he ran for the cockpit door and sat on him for about 20 minutes until the plane landed at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport.
“There were four of us on top of him. ... Everybody else kind of took a seat and that’s how we landed.”
An off-duty airline captain who was a passenger on the flight entered the flight deck before landing in Amarillo and took over the duties of the ill captain, the airline said.
The captain was taken to a local medical facility after the plane landed.
Shane Helton, 39, said he saw emergency and security personnel coming on and off the plane as it sat on the tarmac in Amarillo.
“They pulled one guy out on a stretcher and put him in an ambulance,” said Helton, who went to the airport with his fiancée to see one of her sons off as he joined the navy.
Authorities interviewed each of the passengers once they had landed and left the plane, said 22-year-old passenger Grant Heppes.
The FBI was co-ordinating an investigation with the airport police, Amarillo police, the FAA and the Transportation Safety Administration, said agency spokeswoman Lydia Maese in Dallas.
The flight left New York at 7am and was in the air for three-and-a-half hours before landing in Texas. The passengers boarded another plane for Las Vegas several hours later.
John Cox, an aviation safety consultant and former airline pilot, said incidents in which pilots become mentally incapacitated during a flight are “pretty rare”. He said he could only recall two or three other examples in the more than 40 years he has been following commercial aviation.
Airlines and the FAA strongly encourage pilots to assert themselves if they think safety is being jeopardised, even if it means contradicting a captain’s orders, Cox said. –
BBC Link with Video
