Jet Blue Pilot

A JetBlue captain who ranted about Iraq and Afghanistan and claimed that a bomb was on a Las Vegas-bound flight was locked out of the cockpit, tackled and restrained by passengers, people aboard the plane said.

The captain of Flight 191 from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport had a "medical situation" and the co-pilot diverted the plane to land in Amarillo, Texas, around 10 a.m. Tuesday, JetBlue Airways said in a statement.

Josh Redick, a passenger sitting near the middle of the plane, said the pilot "stormed out" of the cockpit.

Tony Antolino, a 40-year-old executive for a security firm, said the captain walked to the back of the plane and seemed disoriented and agitated. Then he began yelling about an unspecified threat linked to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They're going to take us down, they're taking us down, they're going to take us down. Say the Lord's Prayer, say the Lord's Prayer," the captain screamed, according to Antolino.

"He was irate," Redick said. "He was spouting off about Afghanistan and souls and al-Qaeda."

Gabriel Schonzeit, who was sitting in the third row, said the captain said there could be a bomb on board the flight.

"He started screaming about al-Qaeda and possibly a bomb on the plane and Iraq and Iran and about how we were all going down," Schonzeit told the Amarillo Globe-News.

'He was spouting off about Afghanistan and souls and al-Qaeda.'—Josh Redick, passenger on Flight 191

The captain had been exhibiting "erratic behaviour," so the co-pilot locked him out of the cockpit, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement.

Antolino, who was in the 10th row, said he and three others tackled the captain as he ran for the cockpit door, pinned him and held him down while the plane landed at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport.

"That's how we landed," he said. "There were four of us on top of him.… Everybody else kind of took a seat and that's how we landed."

An off-duty captain who just happened to be a passenger on the flight went to the flight deck and took over the duties of the ill captain "once on the ground," the airline said in a statement. It didn't elaborate.

'It was a team effort'

Paul Babakitis, a retired New York Police Department sergeant, was among the group of passengers who helped to subdue the captain, who he described as weighing about 250 pounds and "solid as a rock" at a height of about 6-4".

"I'm not foreign to situations like this, but I don't expect them at 30,000 feet," Babakitis told CNN Tuesday night.

"It was a team effort, it truly was. When we took him down, he was screaming about, 'Say your prayers, say your prayers.' … We isolated him, we contained him, we prevented other passengers from getting injured."

Babakitis and Antolino both credited the flight's co-pilot with helping to coax the "incoherent" JetBlue captain out of the cockpit.

"The co-pilot of the flight, he really, I think, is the hero here," Antolino said. "Because he had the sense to recognize that something was going horribly wrong."

Shane Helton, 39, of Quinlan, Okla., said he saw emergency and security personnel coming on and off the plane as it sat on the tarmac at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport.

Passengers interviewed

"They pulled one guy out on a stretcher and put him in an ambulance," said Helton, who went to the airport with his fiancée to see one of her sons off as he joined the navy.

Helton said the ambulance then sat on the tarmac next to the plane for more than 30 minutes.

JetBlue said the ill captain was taken to a medical facility in Amarillo.

Once on the ground and off the plane, authorities interviewed each of the passengers, according to 22-year-old passenger Grant Heppes, of New York City.

The FBI was co-ordinating an investigation with the airport police, Amarillo police, the FAA and the Transportation Safety Administration, according to agency spokeswoman Lydia Maese in Dallas.

She declined to comment on whether any arrests have been made.

As a result of the incident, the FAA will review the captain's medical certificate — essentially a seal of approval that the pilot is healthy. All pilots working for scheduled airlines must have a first-class medical certificate. The certificates are required to be renewed every year if the pilot is under 40, and every six months if they are aged 40 or over.

To obtain a certificate, the pilot must receive a physical examination by an FAA-designated medical examiner that includes questions about the pilot's psychological condition. The medical examiner can order additional psychological testing.

Pilots are required to disclose all existing physical and psychological conditions and medications.

In 2008, an Air Canada co-pilot had a mental breakdown on a flight from Toronto to London and was forcibly removed from the cockpit, restrained and sedated. A flight attendant with flying experience helped the pilot safely make an emergency landing in Ireland. None of the 146 passengers and nine crew members on board were injured.

source : bbcnews