Flight Attendant Hits Passenger Over The Head With Coffee Pot, Stops Him From Opening Plane Door...The American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. was diverted after a melee onboard

An unruly passenger has struck again, but, this time the airline struck back. An American Airlines flight was diverted to Kansas City International Airport in Missouri on Sunday afternoon because of “an unruly passenger,” according to the Associated Press. The flight was originally going from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles.

Juan Rivas, a Los Angeles resident, was subdued by both passengers and crew members when he tried to open one of the plane’s doors. The real highlight of the melee was one flight attendant who hit Rivas over the head with a coffee pot as he tried to open the door. The Transportation Safety Agency told CBS News there weren’t any air marshals on board, and the suspect was eventually restrained by two passengers and two off-duty police officers.

The charge – a felony – carries up to a 20 year prison sentence if Rivas is eventually convicted.

According to an affidavit, one flight attendant told investigators that Rivas first approached the front of the plane to tell a flight attendant that “people were attempting to hurt him and they followed him onto the plane.” He told the attendant one of those people was sitting in his row, so they allowed him to switch to a different seat.

Some time later, Rivas approached the cockpit again and told the flight attendant the plane wasn’t actually flying. That’s when things started to go south… quickly.

The flight attendant put a service cart between her and Rivas to keep some distance. He then allegedly grabbed plastic cutlery and shoved it up his sleeve, holding it “like a shank.” He then allegedly tried to smash a champagne bottle on the counter.

Rivas then tried to open the passenger door to the plane. A passenger said in the affidavit that he was pulling so hard the door moved two to three inches away from the frame.

This is when our coffee pot hero comes into play. They struck Rivas multiple times with the coffee pot before passengers stepped into subdue him. Once Rivas was on the ground, passengers said they taped his legs and used zip ties from the flight attendants to restrain him.

Another passenger – one of the off-duty cops – said he punched Rivas and helped restrain him with handcuffs and duct tape.

Part of the incident was captured on video and posted to Twitter. User Mouaz Moustafa documented a lot of what happened, including the change in flight paths.

passengers held the individual and a flight attendant used a coffee pot to subdue him as the plane descended rapidly. the man was bleeding as the police in this video are taking him off the flight after landing in Kansas #AA1775 pic.twitter.com/HL2JnyYglw

Flight attendants told investigators they did not see Rivas drink any alcohol during the flight.

The flight attendants’ union – the Association of Professional Flight Attendants tweeted “this violent behavior must stop.”

This is just the latest incident of unruly passengers on planes. 2021 was actually the worst year on record for ne’er-do-well airline passengers. Last year, the FAA received more than 5,500 reports of unruly behavior. 2022 is off to a roaring start as well. Nearly 400 incidents have been reported so far this year.

Physics explains why you can never open a plane door mid-flight

A British Airways passenger caused chaos after trying to open the aircraft door during a flight, but air pressure and clever design makes it impossible

It’s the nightmare of travellers sitting near the emergency exit and the inevitable fate of bad guys tussling on a plane with James Bond – the door erupting open mid flight, sucking them into the cold blue and white.

This scenario was no doubt running through the minds of the passengers of a BA flight to Riyadh this week, when a man, reportedly in the grip of a panic attack, tried to pull open the aircraft door. He was restrained – by the brother of boxer of Dillian White, no less – and eventually calmed. The doors remained sealed.

This isn’t the first time passengers have attempted to exit a plane in midair. In 2015, a passenger gave it a go on a Hainan Airlines flight to Mongolia, this time as the plane was preparing to land. In June, Air Europa flight UX89 was forced to turn back after a passenger tried to pull open the emergency exit. And just last month, holidaymaker Chloe Haines appeared in magistrates court on charges of attacking two stewards who tried to stop her from doing the same. (The unifying detail of all of these stories is that the passengers were flagrantly drunk).

While the prospect of being hurled into the troposphere due to the antics of a drunken passenger isn’t alluring, you’ll be pleased to hear that, in all of these cases, the actual risk of the door being opened was nil.

There are two lines of defence at play here. The first is, as you might expect, that the doors are mechanically locked. These locks are controlled by the pilot. “You see that great big handle on the door – that's actually locked shut,” says Steve Wright, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of the West of England. ”When the plane touches down and is taxing to the gate, you’ll hear the pilot say “doors to manual”. It's only at that point where the pilot has handed off control, and where those doors are actually capable of being opened by someone standing near them.”

The reason the doors can be opened when you’re on the ground is simple, explains pilot Patrick Smith on his blog AskThePilot – it’s in case the plane needs to be evacuated. He points out that you may also hear the pilot relay the command “disarm doors”, which refers to the automatic deployment function of the slides. “Those slides can unfurl with enough force to kill a person, and you don’t want them billowing onto the jet bridge or into a catering truck,” he writes.

The bottom line of all this is that while you’re on the ground, it can be possible to open the door. In 2015, for instance, a video emerged of a man opening the door on the runway to “get some fresh air”.

Mid-flight, however, it's a different story. And it’s all to do with air pressure. When we rise higher in the atmosphere, less pressure is exerted on oxygen molecules (what’s known as Boyle’s Law). This means that less pressure is available to let these molecules diffuse into our vascular systems – basically, it gets harder to breath.

Once you get up above 18,000 feet, we begin not to take in enough oxygen to supply the brain – you’ll pass out in about half an hour. Since airliners fly between 30,000 and 43,000 feet, air needs to be pumped into the airplane to keep the interior pressure at a survivable level. (At this altitude, you’ll grow delirious within seconds and pass out in less than a minute, hence why air masks drop down during depressurization events, and why you should attend to yourself before a baby.) We are in fact in a mild state of hypoxia all the time on a flight.

But what’s all this got to do with the plane’s doors? Simply, the cabin pressure seals them shut. You need to think of the door like a giant bath plug, explains Wright – taking advantage of this plug hole effect is why almost all aircraft exits open inward. “As you step off the plane, have a look at the door, you'll notice how it's quite an interesting tapered shape,” says Wright. “And that's because it's actually plugged in – you'll notice when the cabin crew opens it they have to do a special sort of Jimmy, or sideways shuffle, because effectively, the door is plugged into a hole.”

The maths here is pretty simple explains Michele Meo, a professor of materials at the University of Bath. “You cannot open because the aircraft is pressurised, and the cabin pressure is higher than the outside air pressure,” he says. “The difference can be as much as 55158.1 Newtons per square meter ( or 5500 kg applied to one square meter). Basically, the door is sealed against the aircraft frame.”

At lower altitude the difference in pressure is smaller, and it grows with altitude. According to Smith, this works out, at typical cruising altitude, at about eight pounds of pressure pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage – eleven hundred pounds against each square foot of door. It doesn’t matter how strong the passenger who wants out happens to be – they aren’t opening that door.

For those of the morbid mindset, it’s actually the windows, not the doors, that are usually the plane’s weak spot, says Wright. And unfortunately, it isn’t a myth that in the event of a door blowing open, passengers would be sucked towards the opening. “In case of a decompression or doors failure the passengers will be sucked out because of the difference in pressure pushing the passengers outside, hence why it is always recommended to wear seat belts,” says Meo. “One famous accident was Aloha airlines in the 1980s, caused by depressurisation, but in that case there were existing cracks inside the airplane. The pressure acted from the inside and made the crack grow until the fuselage was ripped apart.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.