An American Airlines passenger was tied to her seat and gagged with duct tape after she allegedly bit a steward and tried to open the plane’s door mid-flight.
The woman, whose behaviour was described as ‘odd’ by other passengers, was said to have told her neighbour she did not want the plane ‘to fly up anymore’ before the outburst.
Her muffled screams could be heard in a TikTok video taken as people disembarked the flight by a girl claiming to have been on the flight with her mum.
The woman could be heard yelling ‘you! you! you!’ repeatedly at passengers despite having tape over her mouth.
She had ‘attempted to open the forward boarding door and physically assaulted, bit and caused injury to a flight attendant’ on the July 6 flight from Dallas to Charlotte, Texas, according to American Airlines.
The company said she was restrained for the ‘safety and security’ of others until the flight landed, where police and emergency services were waiting.
The girl who filmed the footage said she had noticed an incident developing near the front of the plane as the crew began locking bathroom doors, after which the captain told everyone to remain seated.
She said the woman hurt a number of other people while frantically trying to get to the door and ‘it took the entire staff team to tackle her and pin her down to her seat’.
Fellow passenger Elizabeth LaClair, who was sat in front of the woman, told The Washington Post: ‘She just seemed off and very odd.’
‘She started getting more and more agitated and very loud, and the man sitting next to her, along with the flight attendants, kindly tried to console her and calm her, but nothing worked.’
The stewards had ‘the look of pure shock of someone who has been a flight attendant for many years and is thinking, I can’t believe this is happening’, she added.
The woman, who had green hair and appeared to be in her 30s, was initially restrained at the feet and wrists with duct tape and what appeared to be zip ties.
After she became more erratic and violent and screaming expletives, the crew asked passengers in the seats around hers to stand up so they could tape her to it.
The woman was taken to a hospital for evaluation and has been placed on American Airlines’ internal no-fly list, according to a company spokesperson.
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