Don’t mess with a celebrity couple while becoming rowdy on the flight or you might find yourself all over the internet while being tasered, squeezed and tied up as a Korean Air passenger learned.
A passenger on an intra Asia flight from Vietnam to Seoul started to go berserk mid flight and began to attack the crew and other passengers around him.
After that the situation really got out of control with the flight attendants reportedly trying to taser him (didn’t work) and other passengers including two celebrities (I take Conde Nasts word for it since I don’t know these people) who then collectively subdued the passenger.
You can read a detailed account of the ordeal at Conde Nast Traveler (see here).
Passengers aboard Korean Air KE480 flew the not-so-friendly-skies when an altercation broke out in the cabin. The travel nightmare, which took place on a flight from Hanoi to Seoul, started when a passenger became agitated midair and his fellow passengers had to step in to restrain him.
An account of the harrowing experience comes courtesy of pop singer Richard Marx and his wife, former MTV VJ Daisy Fuentes. Apparently, the passenger (who was seated in the row next to the couple) became violent, attacking other passengers and pulling the hair of several female crew members. With the crew apparently unable to restrain the attacker on their own, Marx and other passengers stepped in, while Fuentes documented the ordeal on her phone.
According to both Marx and Fuentes, the scary situation was made worse by the crew’s utter lack of preparation. Fuentes says that although a crew member had a taser, no one on board was trained to use it, and the rope that the aggressor was restrained with had to be retied several times. …
The lady documented the mess with her cellphone which brings us candid shots that were uploaded to her Instagram as linked in the article above:
Training of the flight attendants wasn’t the the best when it came to dealing with this situation if you want to give any weight to the accounts of the passengers and the pictures associated with it.
… On our flight from Hanoi to Seoul a guy sitting in the next row from us got crazy & started attacking the flight attendants & passengers. When he started pushing the female staff and pulling them by the hair @therichardmarx was the first to help subdue him. This went on for FOUR hrs. I feel horrible for the abuse the staff had to endure but no one was prepared for this. They never fully got control of him. They didn’t know how to use the taser & they didn’t know how to secure the rope around him (he got loose from their rope restraints 3 times).
There there is this very weird image of the flight attendant trying to push the passenger which seems more an attempt to hug him into submission.
I’m not surprised about this unpreparedness for critical situations. Korean Air is notorious for their crew barely being able to communicate, let alone solve problems. I’ve flown the airline repeatedly over the last 4 years on both long haul and intra Asia flights and the pattern was always the same. The crew members all look very beautiful and elegant but when you try to talk to them in English even an out of the ordinary beverage order gets lost in translation.
Conclusion
This case highlights a few important points. One being that yes, it’s a complete nuisance to have such idiots on your flights and it’s dangerous as well.
More important however is the notion that the cabin crew was completely unable to control the situation even though the equipment was available. The flight attendant was untrained how to use the taser or too excited to do it properly. As I mentioned above I find based on personal experience that Korean Air is notorious for this and completely different from let’s say Asiana where I always found the crew to be well trained and professional. Remember the Asiana crash landing in San Francisco? The Asiana crew handled the evacuation very professional. I don’t want to think about what would happen if Korean Air was in the same situation.
