Talk about a wild ride from start to finish: A female passenger’s bad behavior on a plane from Miami to Chicago caused the plane to make an emergency stop in Indianapolis on Monday afternoon.
According to ABC7 in Chicago, the woman’s unruly behavior aboard American Airlines Flight 1284 led to her arrest.
Marian Frendt, a passenger on the flight, told ABC7 that the woman seemed “disoriented” during the flight, “not being able to find her seat, walking back and forth… And when she came to the back, she was sweating profusely.”
From there, things only got weirder. Another passenger, Jim Saviano, told ABC7 that the woman was repeatedly screaming expletives at the back of the plane.
Frendt then witnessed the woman’s interaction with another passenger. “She started kicking the seat of the passenger in front of her,” Frendt said, “and he apparently turned around to complain. And she hit him.”
After that, a flight attendant took the woman to the back of the plane.
“She was trying to talk the girl down,” Saviano explained. He said that the woman “seemed really calm” and talked to the flight attendant about her boyfriend.
Yet apparently the passenger’s rampage hadn’t yet ended.
“And then, all of a sudden, she grabbed [the flight attendant] by the face, kissed her, and then punched her in the face,” Saviano said.
According to other passengers, the pilot used the intercom to ask “large passengers” to restrain the woman. One of those passengers was Darnell Wilson of Chicago.
“She was on the ground,” Wilson said, who assisted three others in restraining the woman. “She wouldn’t stand up. She kept hollering that she was going to mess herself, like she was cursing people out. It was really absurd.”
Each day around eight million people board commercial jets like this one, but public safety incidents are rare. Because the woman became erratic while the plane was flying over the Indiana/Kentucky border, the Indianapolis Airport Authority authorized the emergency landing at 5:44 p.m.
Unfortunately, the madwoman still hadn’t given up. When the authorities from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office met the woman on the plane, she kicked one of the officers as he was attempting to arrest her.
As the woman was finally escorted away in flexi-cuffs, several passengers filmed the arrest.
In the end, the anonymous passenger was charged with battery with injury, battery without injury, battery of a public safety officer, criminal recklessness, disorderly conduct, and disruption of the operation of an aircraft.
She was taken to Marion County Jail. Her name has not yet been released.
As for the rest of the 150 or so passengers, they finally arrived at O’Hare International Airport about 90 minutes late. The flight attendant needed an ice pack for her face but was otherwise unharmed.
