Posted on 04/22/2006 6:33:34 PM PDT by SmithL
DENVER -- Passengers aboard a United Airlines flight had some help when they had to take matters into their own hands to prevent Jose Manuel Pelayo-Ortega from bringing their plane down.
Three Secret Service agents headed west to join President Bush's entourage joined with passengers to subdue Pelayo-Ortega when he tried to open one of the doors on the Airbus A-320.
"Had he opened the door, we'd all be dead," passenger Donna Bell of Visalia, Calif., told the Sacramento Bee after the plane was searched and allowed to continue westward.
Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahensaid three agents between assignments help detain Pelayo-Ortega, who was taken off the plane after it made an emergency landing in Denver.
"That saved us," Ian Grossman of Chicago told the Bee. "You don't know what will happen if a guy like that is loose in the cabin."
The Bee reported that passenger Joe Pena, a senior airman at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif., described the incident as like a bar fight. "I heard a bunch of commotion, and I heard somebody yell 'What are you doing' and 'Get down,' then I saw the guy put into a chokehold, put on his back and pinned down so he couldn't move," Pena said in Sacramento, after hugging his tearful wife, Candy.
While Pelayo-Ortega was being detained, two F-16 fighter jets from Buckley Air Force Base east of Denver scrambled to intercept the plane, which carried 138 passengers and six crew. Had the plane "been judged as a threat by the highest levels of our government, they could make the decision to have the plane shot down," said Lt. Commander Sean Kelly, a spokesman for NORAD, a U.S.-Canadian military command based outside Colorado Springs that monitors missiles, aircraft and space objects and warns of threats.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Why do people go nuts on airplanes?
maybe he smoked some loco weed before takeoff and was so HIGH that he figured he didnt need the airplane anymore?
Not to mention, in post offices !
Illegal aliens do door openings on airplanes that Americans won't do.
Very funny, though.
I don't believe the door could be opened in flight even if someone wanted to. The doors generally sit on the inflatable seals from the inside out. So the more pressure in the fuselage of the aircraft, the harder the door is pushed outward against the seals.
The legacy of flight 93 lives on...
Exactly. There is about 5 psi pressure differential with the cabin higher than the outside. The door is about 5 ft by 3 ft or 15 sq ft. A square foot is 144 sq inches.
You smart freepers get the picture. Jose would have had to be super Jose to open the door as they open inward.
Maybe the in-flight movie was Brokeback Mountain.
He might have had a flashback to that commercial a couple of years ago where a passenger jumped from one plane to another in mid-flight because he didn't like the kind of coffee they were serving (it wasn't Colombian).
Is there a thread on FR that is not hijacked by some illegal immigration jihadist?
This crap is reported as fact. 10 people couldn't open that door.
One of these times, everybody else is just going to strap themselves in and let the idiot try to open it, just to see what happens to him if he succeeds.
ROTFLOL Nice jab :)
I'm happy he wasn't I a flight I had from Atlanta to Boston that had a broken seal. That door squealed for the entire flight. I still can't believe we didn't land shortly after we took off.
ping
I wondered about that. Surely it would have happened before if it was that easy.
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