A woman on an American Airlines flight had an apparent mental breakdown, causing her to try to open the plane’s door mid-flight and attack flight attendants.
Yahoo News reports that as a result, flight attendants had to duct tape the woman to her seat, with the whole incident captured on a since-deleted TikTok video, filmed by user @lol.ariee. The video allegedly shows the unknown woman in first class, with tape on her mouth and body, on a flight that was traveling to Charlotte, North Carolina from Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas.
The person narrating the TikTok said that the uproar began halfway into the flight when the attendants were “running up and down the aisles, frantically kind of like whispering to each other.” She continued, “It was just kind of like chaos and no one knows what’s going on.”
When the pilot finally acknowledged the incident over the intercom, he told passengers to remain in their seats due to “a bad situation on the plane,” though he didn’t describe what was happening.
@lol.ariee said she finally learned what happened from a flight attendant who said that the woman was experiencing a mental breakdown, in which she “had an outburst” and tried to get off the aircraft. “She was saying, ‘I need to get off this plane,’ and she went up to the exits and started banging on the doors, saying, ‘You need to let me off this plane!’” @lol.ariee said.
The woman allegedly started to bite, spit, and attack the flight attendants, which led to her getting duct-taped. American Airlines told the New York Post that a woman “attempted to open the forward boarding door” mid-flight and was ultimately restrained “for the safety and security of other customers and our crew.”
In another video, @lol.ariee said it seemed that “what was happening seemed like it was beyond the woman’s control. She was scared.” She continued, “They should have a better way of going about it…I feel like it was handled poorly.”
