A man who made a weird announcement about oxygen masks over a plane’s public address system and then became wildly disruptive, requiring cabin crew to restrain him, turned out to be an off-duty flight attendant.
Delta Flight 1730 from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Georgia was forced to divert so an unruly man could be removed by police, CBS News in Los Angeles reported. Delta confirmed that the passenger was an off-duty flight attendant for the airline.
CBS said the problem started when the man made an ominous, unauthorised announcement over the plane’s PA system, telling everyone to take their seats and prepare to put on their oxygen masks.
Then a disturbance broke out. Accounts differ over whether the man tried to open the cabin door, with some passengers claiming he tried that, though the airline denies it.
The bizarre incident follows another on a Delta flight a week earlier, when a man attempted to break into the cockpit, screaming: “We need to land this plane.”
CBS quoted expert medical opinion that such incidents could be due to “pandemic-induced post-traumatic stress syndrome”.
If so, the worrisome new syndrome seems to be prevalent on the ground as well. In a Georgia supermarket earlier this week, a male shopper gunned down a female check-out cashier who had dared to ask him to put on a face mask to protect against the Covid-19 pandemic.
The customer refused to wear a mask, argued over it and then returned in a rage and shot the female cashier dead, police say. After this horror, the ensuing scene was like something out of the Wild West. A supermarket security guard immediately opened fire on the offender and a gunfight broke out in the store, in which both the gunman and the security guard (who was wearing a bullet-proof vest) were hit.
A second cashier, grazed by a bullet, was later treated at the scene. Other check-out staff ran for their lives. Police arrested the wounded gunman as he tried to crawl out the door. For shoppers, it was an afternoon to remember.
Written by Peter Needham
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