Apparently an Alaskan Airlines pilot had a mental breakdown whilst in the jump seat of an Embraer 170 and tried to pull the fire handles to stop the engines. Before anyone jumps to conclusions and believes this was possibly politically motivated, this was a white american….. he has since been charged with 84 attempts of attempted manslaughter, 84 counts of reckless endangerment.
See here for more details. Just wondering whether there will be any response to this, such as banning jump seat passengers, even if they are fully licensed and rated…..
The rumour I was hearing on a US pilot’s forum is the guy was “pranking” the flight crew and they didn’t think the joke was funny…
The clumsy prank theory sounds very likely – if he really wanted to do it he would not have had any trouble doing it before the pilots could react.
Either way he’ll have plenty of quiet, uninterrupted time to think of future pranks… like the rest of his life probably. If it WAS a prank then “terminal stupidity” ought to carry a life sentence.
eurogaguest1980 wrote:
The clumsy prank theory sounds very likely – if he really wanted to do it he would not have had any trouble doing it before the pilots could react.
Indeed.
The guy was an airline pilot with Alaska. If he really wanted to bring an airplane down his chance of “success” would have been much higher while he himself being on duty…
Am now hearing that he had partaken of Magic Mushrooms and announced that he “wasn’t feeling well”……
Looks like based on police reports the “prank” theory is not correct. This guy seems to need some mental health support, a lot of money, and a good lawyer if he’s ever going to see the outside of a jail again. After watching a lot of YT videos it sure seems like we have a lot of people in our society that have mental health issues, and we need to deal with this reality.
After watching a lot of YT videos it sure seems like we have a lot of people in our society that have mental health issues
You don’t need to watch YT to realise that 
The main filters in this case are the sheer amount of work required to reach the cockpit (even in GA) and then the aviation medical has some chance of filtering out the really bad cases.
