By Bart Jansen,
USA Today
AMARILLO, Texas — It was an extraordinarily rare incident in the air -- and a frightening one for passengers: A JetBlue captain was locked out of the cockpit and wrestled to the floor by passengers after screaming about a bomb during a flight from New York to Las Vegas.
JetBlue said the unidentified captain of Flight 191 had a “medical situation” Tuesday and that an off-duty captain traveling on the flight entered the cockpit before the landing “and took over the duties of the ill crewmember” after it was diverted to Amarillo, Texas.
The captain “was struggling, yelling lots of things about Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. ‘They’re going to take us down,’ that type of thing,” said Tony Antolino, 40, of Rye, N.Y., one of several passengers who wrestled the captain to the floor and held him down.
Although flight attendants have had outbursts and had to be restrained, aviation experts say few pilots have.
John Cox, a former pilot who is now president of Safety Operation Systems, said he could recall only a couple incidents like this in 40 years in commercial aviation.
The incident raises questions about passengers’ safety when a captain and first officer are behind locked and hardened cockpit doors. It also raises questions about pilots’ mental, as well as physical, fitness to fly.
Brie Sachse, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said that the co-pilot locked the door to the cockpit after the captain left it during the flight. “When the captain attempted to enter the locked cockpit, he was subdued by passengers,” she said.
Cox said the co-pilot could land the plane safely without any assistance. He also said that crewmembers are trained to handle combative passengers and that “the same training to restrain an abusive passenger that presents a physical threat could be utilized against a crewmember.”
Airline pilots must undergo psychological and physical assessments to get a medical certificate or they cannot fly. The assessments are done by a doctor approved by the FAA and performed annually if the pilot is younger than 40 and every six months if older. The examiner can order additional psychological testing.
The FAA said it is investigating the incident.
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