United flight to Israel turns back after passenger refuses to get off crew seat

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United flight to Israel turns back after passenger refuses to get off crew seat | Secret Flying

‘Disruptive’ passenger forces Israel-bound United flight to turn back.

 

A United Airlines flight from Newark Liberty International Airport, New Jersey, to Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, turned back three hours after takeoff, amid an altercation between an Israeli passenger and the cabin crew onboard.

 

Flight UA90, which departed early Sunday morning, was only a few hours into its flight when a passenger was waiting for the bathroom and decided to sit down in one of the seats designated for flight attendants.

 

According to an eyewitness, who spoke to the Israeli media outlet Ynet, a flight attendant asked the man to get out of the seat, for which he refused to do.

 

“Crew members told him that if he did not return to his seat, the plane would be turned back to New York,” she recounted.

 

She says the man appeared not to believe them, ridiculing the crew members while remaining in the crew seat.

 

To everyone’s surprise, the crew member followed through by instructing the pilot to turn the plane around and return to Newark. “No one bothered to inform us,” she said. “We just noticed it on the map showing our flight path and when we landed, we saw the police waiting for the plane.”

 

United confirmed that law enforcement was waiting at the terminal, where officers removed the passenger. Video shows a man in jeans and a dark, long-sleeved shirt being escorted off the plane as other passengers can be heard murmuring.

 

A Twitter user named Jeff Hunt posted a video and an image of the plane’s flight track, tweeting that his first flight from Washington D.C. was cancelled because of weather, so he took a train for three hours to leave out of Newark.

 

“Flight delayed 2.5hrs due to weather. 4hrs into flight, unruly passenger requires return to Newark,” Hunt tweeted. “Thanks, bro.”

 

Hunt told Insider that the unruly passenger later claimed that he hadn’t been physical and that United overreacted. Despite the collective frustration, Hunt said the man hung around the displaced passengers for hours “pleading his case,” indicating that he was not arrested.

 

A similar incident occurred last year on the same Newark to Tel Aviv route, also with United.

 

An Israeli couple sat themselves in business class, without paying an additional fee and without the crew’s consent. After less than an hour into the flight, the pilot decided to turn back and call the police to arrest the couple upon landing.

 

They were taken in for questioning, and the flight was cancelled because the crew had exceeded the maximum in-flight work hours per shift.