After landing in Honolulu on Friday on a flight from Los Angeles, passengers described a midair disruption involving an unruly man whose attempts to get to the front of the jetliner prompted flight attendants and passengers to subdue him and fighter jets to escort the plane.
Passengers noticed him before the plane even took off.
Mark and Donna Basden were among the first to board the plane and found a laptop in Mark Basden’s seat pocket. The couple from Albuquerque, New Mexico, assumed it was from the previous flight.
Photo: Reuters
A flight attendant said it must belong to a man in the bathroom.
Then a “disheveled looking fellow” walked out, Donna Basden said.
Mark Basden handed the man the laptop, telling him it had been in his seat.
He said the man scowled at him, took the laptop, opened it, closed it and then tried to sit in another seat in first class.
Donna Basden said the man “clearly looked out of place,” but he did not say anything.
The flight attendant asked to see his boarding pass, then when she looked at it, she told him he was in row 35 and sent him to the back of the plane.
About halfway through the six-hour flight, the Basdens saw the same man, holding his laptop, with something over his head, which they thought was a towel or a blanket.
The man, identified by law enforcement officials as Anil Uskanil, 25, of Turkey, was duct-taped to his seat until the plane landed in Honolulu and federal agents arrested him, passenger Lee Lorenzen said.
The trouble with Uskanil began about eight hours before the flight departed when he was arrested before dawn at Los Angeles International Airport for opening a door that led onto an airfield ramp, according to the Los Angeles Airport Police, who provided Uskanil’s identity.
Police said Uskanil had been drinking, but did not meet the criteria for public drunkenness.
He was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor trespassing, given a date to appear in court and allowed to take the flight to Honolulu.
“He was very quiet, moving very sluggish. He was trying to approach the cabin, like where the captain is,” passenger Grant Arakelian said.
Lorenzen and his wife Penny Lorenzen, of Orange County, California, were sitting in first class and saw a “really serious look” on the flight attendant’s face.
The flight attendant ran down the aisle with her serving cart and blocked the doorway separating first class from the rest of the plane.
“She jammed the cart in that the doorway and she just said: ‘You’re not coming in here,’” Lee Lorenzen said.
He said the man was pushing against the cart, trying to get through.
At that point, passengers came up from behind and grabbed him.
He was restrained in his seat with duct tape for the rest of the flight.
“He didn’t really fight or anything,” University of Southern California student Arakelian said.
“It caused worry on the plane — more curiosity than fear I would say, because he wasn’t acting irrationally, but you could tell something was kind off about him as well,” he said. “Once they took him to the back we never heard anything else about it.”
American Airlines Flight 31 had 181 passengers and six crew members on board, airline spokeswoman Katie Cody said without providing details about the incident.
Uskanil having a laptop with him might have caused more concern than usual, with US and European officials exchanging threats about airplanes believed to include bombs hidden in laptop computers.
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