An American Airlines flight bound for Miami, in the United States, was suspended for hours in Honduras this Tuesday (11) after a passenger invaded the plane’s cabin and damaged it. The man was arrested, according to information released by the company.
Video recorded by a person outside and shared on social media shows he still tried to climb out of the aircraft window when crew members intervened to stop him. It was not clear, however, the passenger’s motives.
Departure took place at Ramon Villeda Morales International Airport, the main airport in Honduras, located in the city of San Pedro Sula. The damaged aircraft — a Boeing 737-800 — had 121 passengers and six crew. Nobody was hurt.
“We applaud our outstanding crew members for their professionalism in handling a difficult situation,” the airline said in a statement.
The flight was originally scheduled to take off just before 3pm local time (6pm GMT), but was delayed by around 7 hours. American Airlines said a replacement aircraft would depart the site at around 9:30 pm. The company’s website, however, showed that the actual departure time was at 10:40 pm.
Passengers were supposed to arrive in Miami at 18:15 (20:15 in BrasÃlia), according to the initial forecast, but disembarked only at 1:50 am this Wednesday (12).
The episode comes at a time when thousands of flights are canceled due to the increase in Covid cases driven by the spread of the omicron variant. The company Latam, for example, announced last weekend that it canceled about 1% of its domestic and international flights scheduled for the month of January.
At least 6,000 flights were canceled for different reasons between Tuesday and Wednesday, according to monitoring by the FlightAware platform.
Episodes in which passengers try to enter the plane’s cabin are not uncommon. In July, in the US, a passenger tried to break into the cabin of a Delta flight from Los Angeles to Nashville that was already in the air. No one was injured, and the man was detained by the FBI, the US federal police, after the flight was diverted to Albuquerque, in the US state of New Mexico.
With such episodes multiplying at American airports, US Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum in November directing federal prosecutors to prioritize investigations into crimes committed on planes, according to information from The Wall Street Journal. .
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has received nearly 6,000 complaints against passengers over the past year, and has launched investigations into 1,075 of them — five times as many as in 2020. Most cases resulted from discussions about the use of of masks for the prevention of Covid, something mandatory in the aviation system.
Since the beginning of this year alone, there have been 76 episodes recorded by the FAA of passengers who caused fights or had violent attitudes. More than half of the incidents are related to the use of masks.
“Passengers who bully, intimidate or threaten violence with crew members and flight attendants do more than harm these employees; they impede the performance of critical tasks that help ensure safe air travel,” said Garland.
.
