Police body camera video NBC 6 exclusively obtained shows American Airlines first-class passenger Elizabeth Bridget Morgan at Miami International Airport moments after she was taken off an international flight in January.
“The passenger in 1D came up and said ‘look I think he (flight attendant) needs your help,” a flight attendant can be heard saying. “She’s treating him very aggressively and badly.”
According to a police report, Morgan “was refusing to wear her mask” and “became verbally aggressive” towards a flight attendant during the Miami to London flight.
“I was afraid that she was going to get more, escalate,” a flight attendant tells Miami-Dade Police officers on the scene trying to piece together what happened.
The plane took off from Miami at 7:59 p.m. with passengers expecting to be at London the next morning, but after over an hour in the air, along the North Carolina coastline, the jet made a U-turn and headed back to Miami, leaving the 129 passengers right where they started.
“It’s a ripple effect. Many, many people are affected by this bad behavior,” said Jay Rollins, a former airline captain. “This incident that we are talking about probably cost the airline six digits … we haven’t even talked about the crew being out of position and the aircraft being out of position, which means the flight, the next day from Europe back to the United States, likely had to be canceled.”
Reports of Unruly Passengers
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) told NBC 6 the number of unruly passengers has tripled since 2019.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), more than 7,000 incidents of unruly passengers have been reported to the FAA since 2021. Most of them related to the use of masks.
In 2021 alone, the FAA proposed $5 million in fines.
“It’s definitely a new world,” said Paul Hartshorn Jr. from the Association of Professional Flight…