In-Flight Alarm

Passengers stop a fake attacker. The man, who pretended to have a bomb and wanted to force open the emergency exit of a Delta Air Lines plane was immobilized and then handed over to FBI agents.

It was to be a peaceful flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, however, Flight 110 of Delta Air Lines transformed for a group of passengers. They got an opportunity to become – despite themselves – heroes when another passenger, Lawrence Johnson, attacked a stewardess and tried to force open an emergency exit, pretending to have a bomb on his person. [Other passengers] threw themselves on the alleged attacker and restrained him, saving themselves and 259 other travelers.

The plane was preparing to descend to the airport in Los Angeles when Johnson, “got up and began to run … and shouted, ‘Do not get close – I have a bomb,'” said Bruce Worrilow, one of the passengers attracted by the screams of the man and the stewardess that Johnson attacked and threw to the ground to get close to the emergency exit. Other people noticed, alarmed at the idea that the man would open the door with the plane still in flight. Among the first to intervene, Chris Llewellyn, the guitarist of the band for the rapper Asher Roth, said, “I saw that this guy was trying to open the emergency exit door and I thought: I will fall with this damn plane,” says Llewellyn. To stop the man and immobilize him in one of the seats, however, required the contribution of other people: “He opposed resistance,” said the young musician, “so I grabbed his arm and I held him down. Meanwhile, someone kept a foot on his head; everyone had taken a different part of the body and held him down. He seemed to become crazy, so I told him to keep quiet because he was not going anywhere.”

The tension on the Boeing 757 remained high until the plane landed and the FBI agents had taken the alleged bomber, who had no device strapped on him, into custody, and, said experts, would still not have been able to force open the emergency exit due to the pressurization of the cabin. “I am happy that I found a plane in which passengers were brave enough to fight,” said Mary Hughes, who was on the flight to Los Angeles for work, “It was fantastic that all that heard got involved.”

In the recent history of American civil aviation, there have been numerous cases in which passengers have intervened personally to prevent hijacking or terrorist activities, in some cases with dramatic results: the most famous episode is that of United Flight 93, which, on September 11, 2001, would have crashed into Capitol Hill. Instead the passengers rebelled against the terrorists, causing the plane to crash in an uninhabited part of Pennsylvania instead of hitting Washington.