Flight attendants should have baseball bats..
LA to DC eh? Did the guy look like a congressman referred to as shift (with the f removed).
Guy in big trouble; interfering with the flight crew plus financial since he’ll be fined and have to pay landing fee at MCI which would be around $25,000 plus whatever AL charges him.
After 9/11 it would have been a good idea to allow pilots access to firearms. Store them in a locked safe in the cockpit. Give each pilot a key. The keys must be turned simultaneously, from different spots in the cockpit. Kinda like with missile launches.
Then there’d be no need for combat-ready coffee pots.
A taser would be more effective than a coffee pot.
I always ask for a ‘seat belt extender’.
Makes for a pretty good club in this kind of situation.....
Moustafa, Moustafa, Moustafa. Irish, perhaps?
Anybody else notice it’s American Airlines that’s been in the news lately?
Where are John Wick and a No. 2 pencil when you really need them?!?
When my daughter was a paramedic, she worked at a Fire Station near Dulles Airport in Virginia. One day they got a call from Dulles to extricate an unruly passenger from one of the international flights. Evidently, just as they were preparing to take off, the passenger was acting crazy and the pilot called the tower to get him off his plane.
My daughter and her partner got onto the plane and discovered that the flight crew and a few passengers had restrained the guy with duck tape. Wasn’t too hard to get him off and to the hospital, LOL.
She told me afterwards it was kinda cool to drive her ambulance out onto the runway.
This is why certain passengers get aisle seats and often bumped up to Business or First class aisle seats.
One adult son, his wife, a 22 year old daughter and a 20 year old son, often get aisle seats and/or upgraded/bumped up for free. Both this son and his wife, our DIL are in their mid 50’s and in terrific shape. Their son wrestled for a top private high school for 4 years. Like his parents, he is in great shape.
Aircraft carry a Flight Deck Crash Axe or at least they did pre-911. It supposedly was replaced by a crowbar but not all aircraft did the conversion.
They usually are with 15 feet of a fire extinguisher
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-G/part-135/subpart-C
§ 135.177 Emergency equipment requirements for aircraft having a passenger seating configuration of more than 19 passengers.
14 CFR 135.177(a)(2)
2. A crash axe carried so as to be accessible to the crew but inaccessible to passengers during normal operations.
Mouaz Moustafa...protected class...out by 8am tomorrow.
I keep a couple of HVAC duct straps (think extra large economy sized zip ties) in my carry on bag in case of a guy like this. They weigh nothing, take up very little room.
KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) -- A man faces federal charges after he caused an American Airlines flight to be diverted to Kansas City.
Juan Rivas, 50, was charged with one count of assaulting and intimidating a attendant. According to court documents, Rivas tried to open a plane door on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Sunday. It started when he walked up to the cockpit area of the plane and grabbed some plastic silverware and held it like a shank.
A flight attendant told federal agents they felt threatened by the knife.
Rivas then grabbed a small champagne bottle and attempted to break it on a counter. He then began to kick and shove a service cat into one of the flight attendants.
Service cat or cart ?
According to the affidavit, this is when Rivas began to grab the handles on the front exit door of the aircraft and tried to open it. A flight attendant then grabbed a coffee pot and hit Rivas twice in the head with it.
One of the passengers, who was a police officer, struggled with Rivas and pulled him away from the door. A passenger punched Rivas in the jaw and another grabbed his neck and pulled him to the floor. Flight attendants and passengers then restrained Rivas, securing his hands and feet with zip ties and duct tape.
Rivas received medical treatment for a laceration on his head. According to flight attendants, they did not serve Rivas any alcohol on the flight.
Rivas remains in federal custody pending a detention hearing, which has not yet been scheduled.
KANSAS CITY, Mo — A retired Kansas City FBI Special Agent said investigators will be working to learn if the man responsible for an emergency landing at KCI Airport Sunday has any ties to dangerous groups.
Jeff Lanza worked for the FBI for 20 years. He expects agents to have that answer in the next week.
Monday, he spoke with FOX4 about 50-year-old Juan Rivas, the passenger in federal custody after Sunday’s American Airlines flight from LAX was diverted to KCI.
“Mainly they’re looking at motivation here,” Lanza said. “What was the motivation for him interfering with the flight crew, which is what’s he’s charged with.”
In a newly obtained affidavit, witnesses hear Rivas say “we’re going to bring down the plane” during a struggle.
It also states that Rivas, who’s 6’3” and weighs 240 pounds;, pulled the emergency door with such force, it “moved away from the frame two to three inches.”
“There’s something happening by the cockpit door and even the flight attendants are nearly crying; they’re very disturbed,” said passenger Mouaz Moustafa. “The plane is going down, descending rather quickly. So, at that moment it’s a moment where I was convinced that this might be it. This thing’s going to go down.”
Witnesses heard Rivas say people were trying to hurt him who followed him onto the plane. He said one was sitting near him and had a knife.
Rivas also said he heard people hurting his family over the phone.
“You’re never going to assume anything until you do an investigation,” Lanza said. “It doesn’t bear the earmarks of a terrorist activity in the way it was conducted. It sounds more like something was going on in this person’s brain that just wasn’t normal.”
Whatever the case may be, passengers are thankful to be on the ground, and for those who stepped in to help.
“There’s a lot of good people that did the right thing, and were heroic and were able to make sure it was a happy ending.”