Put away by man

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(Bild: pettys - stock.adobe.com)

Distressing situation on board: in the middle of a Fiji Airways flight, a woman goes berserk, screams and lashes out. Racist insults are also hurled. To calm her down, the crew has a very questionable idea.

It takes eleven hours to fly from San Francisco to Nadi in Fiji - while for some the time flies by, for others their nerves are frayed at some point. This was the case for an Australian woman. She was very calm for the first half of the trip, writes news.com. But then her husband asked the crew to allow him to sit in another seat away from his wife, a passenger told the news portal. "When the crew refused to tell the wife where he had been moved to, the wife started to get louder."

Wild, never-ending shouting ensued. As if that wasn't enough, the guests on board as well as the crew were insulted. "The passengers were particularly angry about her racist remarks towards the Fijian crew members," a witness reported. The content of her hate speech is not known. "Many shouted at the woman to be quiet and behave herself." Parents were even forced to cover their children's ears, such was the vulgarity with which the Australian woman shouted through the aircraft.

She threatened the crew members and threw objects such as cups at them.

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Slap in the face for the flight attendant
Then the woman also became violent: "She threatened the crew members and threw objects such as cups at them," the witness continued. One flight attendant even slapped her. According to the police report, she was also drunk.

According to the officers' report, the rioter was first taken to the back of the plane. She resisted as much as she could. Even her husband was unable to restrain her. After the crew did not know what else to do, they finally simply taped the troublemaker's mouth shut. Video footage of this scene is doing the rounds on the internet:

Woman charged in Fiji
The airline justified this approach with a zero-tolerance policy towards any threatening behavior. "At Fiji Airways, the safety of our passengers and crew members is our highest priority," it said in a statement. According to the Fiji Civil Aviation Authority, airlines may ask passengers whose behavior can be classified as "disruptive" to leave the aircraft. In addition, cabin crew are authorized to "take such action as they deem appropriate to prevent the passenger from continuing such behavior". It is unclear whether this still includes taping over the mouth.

In any case, uncomfortable times are now on the cards for the Australian woman. The woman was received directly at the airport in Nadi and charged under the Fiji Civil Aviation Act. She is still in the custody of the immigration authorities.