Passengers recount fears during captain breakdown

LAS VEGAS — Passengers aboard an early morning flight bound from New York to Las Vegas first noticed something wrong when the plane's top pilot came out of the cockpit, didn't close the door and tried to force his way into an occupied bathroom.

The JetBlue captain's co-workers tried to calm him as he became more jittery, coaxing him to the back of the plane while making sure — above all — that he didn't get back near the plane's controls.

Then, he sprinted up the cabin's aisle — ranting about a bomb, screaming "They're going to take us down!" and urging confused passengers to pray.

"Nobody knew what to do because he is the captain of the plane," said Don Davis, the owner of a Ronkonkoma, N.Y.-based wireless broadband manufacturer who was traveling to Sin City for a security industry conference.

"You're not just going to jump up and attack the captain," Davis said.

But four men did tackle the pilot, using seat belt extenders and zip tie handcuffs to restrain and pin him to the floor for more than 20 minutes while the co-pilot and an off-duty pilot who was aboard landed the plane in Amarillo, Texas.

JetBlue on Wednesday confirmed the pilot's name, Clayton Osbon.

The company's CEO and president Dave Barger told NBC's "Today" show that Osbon is a "consummate professional" whom he has "personally known" for years.

There is nothing in the pilot's record to indicate he would be a risk on a flight, Barger said Wednesday.

"Clearly, he had an emotional or mental type of breakdown," said Tony Antolino, a security executive who sat in the 10th row of the plane and tackled the pilot when he tried to re-enter the cockpit.

"He became almost delusional," Antolino said after arriving in Las Vegas from Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport some six hours after schedule.

Josh Redick, who was sitting near the middle of the plane, said the captain seemed "irate" and was "spouting off about Afghanistan and souls and al-Qaida."

The airline described the incident as a "medical situation" involving the captain of JetBlue Airways Flight 191 from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. Airline officials said he was taken to a hospital.

"It was a scary situation," said Charlie Restivo, an employee of Davis' who traveled with him and sat in the plane's fourth row.

"It was like a movie, it really was," he said. "It just didn't look real."

The outburst came weeks after an American Airlines flight attendant was taken off a plane for rambling about 9/11 and her fears the plane would crash. An aviation expert could recall only two or three cases in 40 years where a pilot had become mentally incapacitated during a flight.

Gabriel Schonzeit, who was sitting in the third row, said the captain said there could be a bomb onboard the flight.

"He started screaming about al-Qaida and possibly a bomb on the plane and Iraq and Iran and about how we were all going down," Schonzeit told the Amarillo Globe-News.

"A group of us just jumped up instinctually and grabbed him and put him to the ground," Antolino said.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the co-pilot had locked the cockpit.

An off-duty airline captain who was a passenger on the flight entered the flight deck and took over the duties of the ill captain before landing in Amarillo, the airline said in a statement.

The customers and crew "just did a great job," JetBlue's Barger said. "That was a true team effort at 35,000 feet."