On Sunday, a flight to Washington, D.C from Los Angeles was interrupted for an emergency landing in Kansas City, Mo after one passenger attempted to break into the cockpit and tried to open the exit door that could in danger the lives of the passengers and the American Airlines flight crew.
The incident happened inside the American Airlines flight 1775 after the plane landed at Kansas City International Airport, and the suspect was identified as 50-year-old Juan Remberto Rivas.
The airline official said, “He was trying to but he couldn’t get to it, then he tried to, he actually tried to open the plane door.”
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“The flight was diverted due to an unruly passenger interfering with the flight crew,” FBI Kansas City said. “As this is an ongoing matter, the FBI is unable to comment further.”
Mouaz Moustafa was one of the passengers who witness the whole incident and told the New York Times that Rivas tried to enter the cockpit and open the plane’s main exit door before several others intervened.
“Other passengers and flight attendants subdued and had to use force to disable the individual,” he wrote on Twitter.
“As people were trying to subdue him and everything, the same flight attendant runs all the way to the back and grabs like a coffee pot, goes all the way to the front and starts bashing this guy, like in the head,” he said.
American Airlines is also grateful to their crew member who initiated the incident as their spokesperson told Fox News Digital in a statement “We’re grateful to our crew members, who are consistently dedicated to the safety and care of our customers and who handled the circumstances with the utmost skill and professionalism.”
All the other passengers had to deplane while the FBI completed a security check.
The plane descended in just seven or eight minutes, Moustafa said.
“Honestly, today, I thought that I was going to die,” he said of the descent.
Sources: The Gateway Pundit, Fox News, Fox LA, ABC News, The New York Times, ABC7, NY Post
