Last week, an aggressive and threatening passenger on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Vancouver was detained by a boyfriend and girlfriend couple who happened to be Austrian police officers working for the Lower Austrian State Police Directorate.
Just two hours into the more than 10-hour journey, the obnoxious passenger began shouting threats and jeopardizing the airplane’s safety.
By this time, the Lufthansa Airbus A340 aircraft had passed through Scotland and was crossing the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Iceland.
Rather of diverting the plane to cope with the rowdy passenger, the Captain and flight attendants enlisted the assistance of a police couple who were on their way to nada for a vacation.
The two police officers employed expert ‘operating procedures’ to overwhelm the man, according to the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, and then confined him using gear stored onboard the plane.
“I am proud of our two employees – their intervention was courageous, intelligent and courageous,” commented Austria’s Interior Minister Gerhard Karner about the incident.
The couple then had to assist in the monitoring of the suspect for the remainder of the flight before it arrived safely in Vancouver and he was apprehended by Canadian authorities.
The disruptive passenger faces no charges, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Despite what may appear to be an unusual decision, the captain of the airplane denied further assistance from the Canadian military and elected not to divert the plane to a nearby airfield to dump the suspect.
Unlike in-flight medical problems, which frequently need an emergency landing, some pilots are content to continue flying to their destination if they are confident that an angry passenger has been adequately secured and no longer constitutes a threat to the flight’s safety.
