A disruptive passenger was restrained with flexible handcuffs and duct-taped to a seat as his flight was diverted to make an emergency landing in Baltimore Thursday night, photos and video from other passengers showed.
Richard Olenick and Juan Mejia were more than halfway through the flight when a man two rows behind them in the first-class section started to become belligerent, Olenick said.
A flight attendant tried to control the situation but the man got increasingly agitated, started to hit the passenger next to him and then hit a woman who tried to intervene, Olenick said.
Airlines care a lot when they have to make an unscheduled landing due to passenger behavior.
Absolutely they’ve about an unscheduled stop, but let’s not pretend this isn’t a complex problem that is contributed to by the airlines themselves (as in Executives) squeezing every penny they can out of passengers at the expense of passengers, crew, airport staff, and more. Deregulating the airlines just made them bigger, which doesn’t help them be responsive and dynamic to a societal epidemic of mental health issues. More rules, lifetime bans, fines, and doing more of the same aren’t going to fix a problem that is bigger than the airlines.