A heroic dad-of-three restrained a passenger who stripped down to her underwear and twice tried to storm a plane cockpit shouting "Allahu Akbar" on his flight to Manchester Airport.
Phillip O'Brien, 35, was travelling on a Jet2 flight from Cyprus to Manchester last week with six members of his family, including his wife and three children aged eight to 14, when a woman in her 30s walked up the aisle in just her underwear shortly after take-off and tried to gain entry to the cockpit twice.
The drainage firm boss, who worked in security as a teenager, restrained the woman when staff onboard were unable to, and helped crew members secure her into a chair on the flight as it was diverted to Paris, after she claimed there were explosives on board. She allegedly asked the children she was with if they were "ready to die".
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Speaking exclusively to our sister paper, The Mirror, the Macclesfield man said: "Everything was normal and then shortly after take-off a woman walked up the aisle naked and banged on the cockpit door shouting 'Allahu Akbar'. As you can imagine everyone was sh**ing themselves.
"I spoke to staff and said, 'Why have you not put her to the floor?'. They said, 'We're not able to'. I said, 'Well I am'. So when the woman went to the cockpit again I took control, took her to the ground and at that point the pilot did an emergency landing to Paris."
According to Mr O'Brien, the woman said her parents were members of terrorist group Isis before she was led away when the pilot diverted the plane to Paris. He said he asked the woman why she was saying such things and she replied: "If I didn't there's going to be an explosion and everybody is going to die".
Jet2 said the Larnaca-Manchester flight was diverted to Paris in the early hours of Tuesday morning, August 9, so a "disruptive passenger could be offloaded".
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