A dad reportedly stepped in to restrain a woman who stripped nude and tried to storm the cockpit during a Jet2 flight.
Phillip O’Brien, 35, is said to have restrained the woman and assisted the onboard crew in detaining her in a chair during a flight from Larnaca, Cyprus to Manchester.
The woman allegedly claimed to have explosives in her possession on the flight and reportedly asked the children with her if they were ‘ready to die’, but a representative of the airline confirmed to LADbible that no explosives were on board.
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O’Brien claimed the woman, who appeared to be in her 30s, told passengers that her parents were members of the terrorist group Isis before the pilot diverted the route to Paris and police officers arrested her.
The former security guard, who was travelling alongside six of his family members including his wife and three children, told the Mirror: “Everything was normal and then shortly after take-off a woman walked up the aisle naked and banged on the cockpit door shouting 'Allahu Akbar'.
"As you can imagine everyone was sh**ing themselves.
“I spoke to staff and said, 'Why have you not put her to the floor?' They said, 'We're not able to'. I said, 'Well I am'."
That’s when O’Brien reportedly approached the woman and ‘took her to the ground’, just before the pilot made an emergency landing at the airport in the French capital.
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He claimed that the woman believed if she didn’t approach the cockpit there would have been ‘an explosion' and said 'everybody is going to die’.
Others took to TikTok to share the disruption, with one social media user writing how they ‘should have been at Manchester airport an hour ago’ when they landed in Paris and authorities detained the woman on the aircraft.
In the video’s caption, one of the onlookers on the flight wrote that a ‘mad woman ran down the aisle mid-flight half-naked, p****d herself and fainted’.
A representative of Jet2 told LADbible: “We can confirm that flight LS944 from Larnaca to Manchester was unfortunately diverted to Charles De Gaulle Airport in the early hours of Tuesday morning so that a disruptive passenger could be offloaded.
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“As a family-friendly airline, we would like to thank our highly trained crew for their professional handling of this very difficult situation, and we would also like to apologise to customers for any inconvenience or upset that this caused.”
The Civil Aviation Authority explains: "The prison sentence for endangering the safety of an aircraft is up to five years.
“Disruptive passengers may also be asked to reimburse the airline with the cost of the diversion. Diversion costs typically range from £10,000 – £80,000 depending on the size of the aircraft and where it diverts to.”
Gabriella Ferlita