Flight makes u-turn after passenger tries to open plane door over Indian Ocean
A Jetstar flight from Indonesia to Australia carrying over 200 passengers was forced to return to Bali after a passenger attempted to open the plane door over the Indian Ocean.
On March 31, Flight JQ-34, bound for Melbourne, left Denpasar Ngurah Rai International Airport at around 8:29 p.m.
In a circulating video online, Australian TV host Jacquieline Felgate shared that the woman tried opening the emergency doors two hours into the flight allegedly "because she wanted to get off flight mid-air."
"Absolute nightmare," she described the incident.
The captain in the clip said that the safest course of action was to make a u-turn to Bali to return to land.
Another passenger on the flight, Australian Survivor star Brooke Jowett described the scene in her now-expired Instagram stories.
"The flight attendants start running, people start freaking out, and we get told to put our seatbelts on immediately," she wrote.
In another post, she claimed a disagreement between the woman and Jetstar staff escalated as she wanted to "sit in a different row and have a chair that could reclined."
"One of the guys who was sitting in front of us was down near the toilets and pulled her away from the door as she was trying to open it," Jowett said, adding that the man was supposedly an off-duty police officer.
In a statement, Jetstar said that the "disruptive" passenger was abusive to the crew and was later removed from the aircraft by Bali authorities.
"The safety and welfare of our customers and crew is our top priority and we thank them for the way they responded to the situation," the airline said. "This sort of unacceptable behavior will never be tolerated on our flights.
Passengers on the flight were provided with an alternative journey, it added.
Earlier in March, a passenger from Madrid aboard Plus Ultra Líneas Aéreas Flight 701 tried to open the plane's emergency exit mid-air, causing a flight attendant who intervened to suffer a fractured leg.
The man was allegedly slapping and shouting at a person asleep next to him, causing the airline crew to move the disruptive passenger to another seat. But the man attempted to open one of the plane's emergency doors.
