A distressed passenger sparked chaos aboard a Frontier Airlines flight last week as panicked passengers prayed and sang songs to restore calm during a harrowing mid-air episode that forced an emergency landing in Dallas.
The frantic Nov. 16 incident aboard Flight 1161 from Houston to Denver was captured on video and shared to the social media platform Reddit, showing passengers and flight attendants trying to subdue the screaming woman who moments earlier walked across a row of seats to avoid efforts to restrain her.
During the fracas, multiple passengers rose from their seats to shout or intervene in the fight, while others attempted to use deescalation techniques to console the woman and end the melee.
Havoc spread as the woman thrashed about the cabin, and as another brawl erupted between a man in a baseball hat and member of the flight crew.
As the disturbance continued, several passengers scrambled to the aisle to avoid getting caught in the scuffle, and eventually the crew managed to pull the woman back up before she collapsed into a seat.
At one point, a flight attendant took to the plane’s loudspeaker to order those involved in the fray to sit back down.
After gaining a leg up on the woman, the flight crew pulled her down the aisle toward the cockpit as she shrieked that she was being kidnapped.
The woman next complained that other passengers were laughing at her as she banged into luggage compartments while howling and trying to break free.
A concerned passenger in a gray beanie began preaching, and pacing up and down the aisle, claiming the distraught woman was possessed by the devil.
“That’s not her!” the other woman admonished passengers, while shaking her finger, adding, “She’s possessed! She needs help!”
As the crew continued to wrestle with the unruly passenger, the woman began to sing hymns while extolling, “Jesus Christ is the way to truth and the life and there’s nobody that’s gonna come to the God, the Father, without Jesus Christ.”
Soon, a member of the flight crew was finally able to calm the crying woman with a long warm embrace at the front of the plane.
Once on the ground, a police officer arrived on the plane to speak with the crew about what happened.
“We need to get her off,” a voice exclaimed from the back of the plane.
The woman was eventually ordered off the flight alongside the woman and the man in the baseball hat who fought one of the flight attendants, according to a passenger who witnessed the incident.
The episode adds to a series of recent flight disruptions involving passengers experiencing mental health episodes.
On Nov. 15, a federal court in Arizona ordered an American Airlines passenger to pay nearly $40,000 to the airline after she pleaded guilty to interfering with the flight crew while traveling from Phoenix to Hawaii in February 2022.
Back in July, marketing executive Tiffany Gomas disrupted an American Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Orlando, which led to her issuing an apology the following month, saying, “I should have been in control of my emotions.”
