Let me start by stating this: I love JetBlue. Whenever I travel, I always check their website first to see if I can book with them before anyone else. I love their planes, their staff, their everything. My only gripe is not having access to free wi-fi on their planes. That’d be the t*ts.
With that said, I feel sorry for them when they suffer PR disasters that seem to come about through little to no fault of their own, like passengers getting stranded on the tarmac in a snowstorm, or flight attendants storming off the job via slides, etc. This afternoon they suffered another PR flub when one of the airline’s pilots apparently lost his mind mid-flight.
Writes the Daily What:
In its official statement, JetBlue would not comment on the nature of the “medical situation,” but passengers on board Flight 191 reported seeing the pilot run up and down the aisle after being kicked out of the cockpit.
According to one witness, the pilot emerged from the restroom mentioning a bomb and shouting “Iraq, al-Qaida, terrorism, we’re all going down.” He then reportedly approached the cockpit and began repeatedly banging on the door asking for the code which had apparently been changed to prevent his reentry.
He was allegedly subdued by multiple passengers prior to landing.
“It seemed like he went crazy,” passenger Gabriel Schonzeit is quoted as saying. “We all knew in the front rows if he got back in the cockpit, we were going down.”
Thankfully, the deranged pilot was subdued and the co-pilot was able to land safely.
But the funniest thing to me about all of this is the “eyewitness video” from aboard the plane that I’ve seen tweeted by at least a dozen people I follow — it’s awful. In the words of one YouTube commenter, in what’s probably the best YouTube comment ever: “stunning video. quality was outstanding and i could totally tell what was going on. I especially liked how you shut it off right when the fight attendant was speaking. Bravo!” Yes, this video is so bad that it’s almost good.
Perfect!
(Image via Shutterstock)