Flight attendants aboard an Alaska Airlines flight were forced to physically subdue a passenger after he physically assaulted another person.
According to a statement from Alaska Airlines provided to PEOPLE, Flight 2221, operated by Horizon Air, was set to depart from Oakland, Calif., for Portland, Ore., on Saturday, Feb. 1. As the plane was sitting at the gate ahead of departure, the passenger — who has not been identified publicly — began experiencing a “violent medical episode,” Alaska said.
In a now-viral video shared on social media, a male flight attendant is seen hitting the man to get him to let go of the hair of the woman sitting in front of him.
“Let go of her hair, sir!” another woman is heard calling out in the video posted on X on Feb. 1.
The flight attendant then pushes the man’s head away, seemingly trying to get him away from other passengers as he continues screaming. The woman who was sitting in front of the man gets out of her seat after he lets go, turning around with a frightened look on her face.
“I need another able-bodied male to come help me,” the flight attendant calls out to the rest of the passengers.
Alaska added in its statement that the man was assaulting “other passengers and our crew.”
“Our flight attendants’ highest responsibility is the safety of guests and crew on board,” the airline told PEOPLE. “Our crew responded to this chaotic situation quickly and kept all guests safe until law enforcement could intervene.”
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The person who shared the video of the incident to X wrote: “We were about to take off from OAK to PDX but this dude started saying weird stuff and rocking back and forth.”
“A flight attendant was called then he grabbed the woman’s hair in front of him and wouldn’t let go, so the flight attendant started punching him in the throat,” the X user continued. “He was restrained for several minutes before being arrested. The flight was cancelled after an attendant refused to fly and could not be replaced.”
“At this time, the guest in question has been banned from Alaska and Horizon due to the nature of the physical assault,” Alaska added.
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A number of confrontational incidents on commercial flights have gone viral on social media in recent months.
In October, a physical fight broke out on an American Airlines flight headed from Miami to Charlotte. A video posted to X by journalist Arjun Singh, who was aboard on the flight, showed three men leaning over the front two seats of the plane as they appeared to restrain a man sitting next to a woman in the alleged altercation.
“This evening, there was a violent incident on my @AmericanAir Flight AA 310 from Miami to Charlotte,” Singh wrote at the time. “Several men jumped to subdue another man in first class, who entered an altercation with the lady next to him.”
In the clip, one of the men helping the woman shouts at the male passenger, “Do not f—ing touch her again,” as a second man says, “Do not f—ing touch her! I don’t give a f—!”
Just this week, an American Airlines flight traveling from Austin, Texas, to Charlotte, N.C., experienced a four-and-a-half hour delay to their flight after police were alerted to suspicious activity on board. ABC News reported that crew members became concerned “regarding the name of a WiFi hotspot involving the word ‘bomb.’ “
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