An airline passenger was jailed after attacking a Black airline worker and hurling racial slurs at him at an airport in southeastern Brazil on Sunday.
Surveillance footage caught the moments Luana Otoni verbally and physically assaulted an Azul Brazilian Airlines operations manager at the Belo Horizonte Airport in the city of Confins, according to Daily Mail.
Moments before the attack, Otoni had to be escorted from her flight after she fell on the ground while approaching the plane.
A worker filed a report revealing that Otoni showed signs of intoxication at the time she tried to board the plane. Employees explained to her that she wasn’t allowed to board the flight due to civil aviation guidelines and would need to take a different flight.
As the operations manager began removing her belongings from the plane, she reportedly got upset and started calling him names like “monkey, a bum, an idiot, and a piece of s***.”
The 39-year-old lawyer also made fun of his job and told him, “You’re happy to have a preppy girl off the plane.”
Surveillance video showed her escalating the situation by slapping, punching, and kicking the worker several times while a male employee tried to restrain her.
Otoni spoke with police after they were called to the scene and said that she tripped as she was walking onto the flight but respected the instructions she was given to disembark.
She was arrested after the assault.
In a statement Azul Brazilian Airlines sent to DailyMail.com, officials said, “Azul emphasizes its strong condemnation of any form of offense or aggression towards its Customers and Crew members, and appropriate measures will be taken.”
Many airline employees are often forced to deal with unruly passengers.
In December 2023, Spirit Airlines had to ban a drunk man who fought a police officer in Colombia. The man was caught on camera arguing with another male passenger while the Florida-bound plane was parked. When a police officer came on board to stop the disruption, the man started fighting the cop. The man was taken into custody once the fight ended.
Last February, two passengers and two airline gate agents brawled at the Philadelphia airport. The fight started after the agents told the mother-daughter duo their bags were too big to be designated as carry-ons and that they had to pay a baggage fee to get on the flight. The daughter ignored the agents and went ahead to board anyway. The fight started when one agent tried to stop her. All four had to answer to a private criminal complaint.
