The brother of professional boxer Dillian Whyte and other passengers are being hailed heroes after intervening when a man apparently suffering from a panic attack attempted to open the door of a British Airways flight traveling from London to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Monday night.
According to The Guardian, passengers, including the six-foot-seven-inch Dean Whyte stepped in to assist the flight crew after the man began pulling the lever on a door at the back of the plane while shouting “I want to get out.”
Whyte reportedly grabbed the man and pulled him away from the door while telling him to calm down. He was met by as many as a half-dozen crew members, one of which was carrying handcuffs. The unidentified passenger eventually calmed down and was returned to his seat.
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“I have never seen anything like that before,” an unidentified flight attendant told The Guardian. Whyte agreed.
“It was like something out of a movie. When I got there he was shouting ‘I want to get out’ in broken English. I managed to grab him and was preparing to slam him hard if necessary but myself and the steward could see he wasn’t quite right in the head so I held him and tried to calm him down. Eventually it worked,” he told The Guardian.
“Our cabin crew cared for a customer who suffered from a panic attack during the flight. We are sorry for any concern this caused our customers,” a British Airways spokesperson said, reassuring travelers that it’s impossible for an aircraft door to open during flight.
Whyte and his brother’s entourage were traveling to Saudi Arabia ahead of Dillian’s fight on the undercard of the Andy Ruiz Jr. versus Anthony Joshua heavyweight title fight scheduled for Saturday night.
This isn’t the first time and won’t be the last time that a passenger attempts to open a plane door mid-flight. In March, passengers had to physically restrain a woman after she tried to open the door of a plane on a Republic Airlines flight operated by Delta from Indianapolis to Detroit and, in April, an EasyJet passenger had to be subdued after attempting to open an emergency exit while the plane was in flight.
