If it feels like unruly airline passenger stories are a weekly occurrence nowadays, it’s because they are. The latest: On Wednesday, accor...
If it feels like unruly airline passenger stories are a weekly occurrence nowadays, it’s because they are.
The latest: On Wednesday, according to WTVD-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina, a Spirit Airlines flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Orlando, Florida, was diverted to Raleigh-Durham International Airport after a passenger claimed a woman being him was stealing his DNA via a syringe.
The only novelty of the viral video was the outré accusation that led to the encounter: As the U.K. Daily Mail noted, the COVID-19 pandemic and masking rules have turbocharged passenger disruptions logged by the Federal Aviation Administration. There were 1,099 FAA investigations in 2021 — against 146 in 2019 and 159 in 2018.
Already this year, there have been 394 such reports, of which 255 involve masking arguments. Despite this, and despite questions regarding the efficacy of masking onboard planes, the Biden administration extended the mask mandate through at least March 18, although you can likely expect it to stick around for longer. In fact, de facto U.S. COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci intimated masks may never go away on planes back in December.
In this case, the inciting factor aboard Frontier Airlines Flight 1335 on Wednesday evening seemed to be more nebulous. In video circulating on social media, the man can be heard claiming his DNA was being stolen.
“Somebody call the pilot, man!” the man screamed. “They’re sticking us brothers with needles, taking motherf*****s DNA.”
The passenger was black, which would explain the “brothers” remark. It was unclear what race the passenger behind him was, although I think we can safely say deoxyribonucleic acid theft wasn’t involved here.
The rest of the video shows at least six passengers restraining the man.
“Hey y’all, he needs to sit in his seat,” one woman says. “So don’t tie his feet like that. He needs to be able to sit in his seat.”
“Don’t let me go. No!” the man exclaims.
A woman announced the passengers were fighting, with another passenger yelling, “tie him up!”
Passengers told WTVD that after the initial DNA rant, the threatened a baby and said he would kill everyone on board. After the passenger was restrained, the plane landed at Raleigh-Durham and the unruly passenger was escorted off.
The flight was on the ground for roughly two hours before continuing to Orlando.
The incident is being investigated by the FBI. A bureau representative said Thursday that charges hadn’t been filed and the probe was still ongoing, WTVD reported.
In a way, it’s only the details that make this unique. Absent someone claiming their DNA sequence was being stolen — indeed, seeming to imply there was a conspiracy to steal an entire race’s DNA, apparently while aloft — is primarily what makes this stand out from a crowd of onboard incidents.
In fact, you can’t even make the argument this is unusual because it didn’t happen aboard a Spirit Airlines flight, as is so often the case. Two days before the incident, Frontier and Spirit announced their intention to merge.
If this sort of thing is so routine, why focus on it? Because it’s become routine.
We’ve become a society on edge, particularly in the air. It doesn’t help when over-officious airline personnel decide a medical exemption for masking doesn’t hold water or a child having a mask down to eat is a problem.
And yet, it’s not an outlier to a country that’s been shaken to its core by the pandemic and the lockdowns that ensued. Violent crime is up across the board. Inflation is eating into wallets at a record rate. Vaccine and mask mandates provoke tensions on both sides.
When incidents like this are so common they hardly raise an eyebrow, our society’s gone awry — and more rules and mandates aren’t going to solve the problem, they’re part of the problem.
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