American Airlines Flight 1774: Woman duct-taped to seat after she tried to open door mid-air
A passenger was reportedly duct-taped to an airplane seat last week after she attacked the flight crew and attempted to open the door of the aircraft mid-flight.
The gray-haired woman, who was not identified, was seen on a video posted on social media with silver duct tape over her mouth. Meanwhile, her arms and body appeared to be taped to the seat. As seen on footage shared by TikTok user @lol.ariee, the woman could be heard screaming "You! You! You!” at passengers as they exited American Airlines Flight 1774, walking past her, after the landing. Flight attendants maintained their composure as they bid the passengers goodbye, the New York Post reported.
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Passengers were already frustrated as the two-hour July 6 flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Charlotte, NC, had already been delayed for three hours before finally departing at midnight. However, chaos broke out about an hour into the trip. TikToker @lol.ariee described the scene in a series of videos. She said that flight attendants began turning on the lights around 1.30 am, “and we see all flight attendants running up and down the aisles, frantically kind of like whispering to each other, talking on the phone with somebody, just frantic. We were kind of like ‘ok, now we’re alert, is everything ok? what’s going on?'”
The TikTok user then noted how the plane's crew began locking bathrooms, grabbing bags from overhead bins, without explaining what was happening. “The flight attendants weren’t saying anything, they were just running to first-class, kind of grabbing bags from the overhead, they randomly locked all the bathrooms. It was just kind of like chaos and no one knew what was going on," she continued. "So the pilot goes over the intercom and he makes an announcement saying, ‘We ask that you guys please stay in your seats for the remainder of the flight unless it’s an extreme emergency. We understand there’s a bad situation on the plane right now, and we’re working on fixing it.'”
Just as the plane was about to land, a flight attendant who sat near the TikTok user explained a woman with an apparent mental issue, “had an outburst and like, had the urge to get off the plane. And 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!'”
“I guess it took all five flight attendants to subdue her and literally take her down so,” the TikTok user recalled of the incident, first reported by TMZ. “They pretty much took her down, put her in the seat, and duct-taped her.” The incident was confirmed by American Airlines, who told the New York Post that the woman had assaulted and bit a flight attendant after she “attempted to open the forward boarding door” and had to be restrained “for the safety and security of other customers and our crew.”
After the flight landed, emergency personnel took the woman to a local hospital. The airline has placed her on their "internal" no-fly list pending an investigation. Opinions were divided over the airline's handling of the unhinged passenger. While some supported the staff duct-taping her, others called for better crisis prevention training for mental health incidents on flights.