tl;dr – A bizarre scene unfolding onboard a JetBlue flight where a woman attempted to open the emergency door.
A bizarre encounter here. On a JetBlue flight, a woman attempted to open the emergency exit door mid-flight (multiple times) before being confronted by flight attendants and other passengers. As you can see in the video below, the woman operating in a panicked state paces the cabin aisle, asking to be let off the plane. As a flight attendant approaches, you can hear other passengers say that the woman attempted to open the door, and you can even see the woman lunge towards what I believe to be the emergency exit door once more.
Evidently, the woman’s boyfriend (who allegedly is a pilot) made mention of a peculiar sound coming from the plane. It was this that prompted the woman to panic and attempt to open the door.
Lots of things to pick apart here. To start, judging from the woman’s panicked state, it would seem that at a minimum, she has bad anxiety when it comes to flying. Past that, I won’t speculate as to her mental state, but in a measure of grace, flying for a lot of folks is a stressful experience, and it’s both unfortunate and foreseeable that a trigger to that stress could set someone off.
Shout out to the flight attendants here. In the limited video we have, it seems as if they were attempting to get the woman’s attention and de-escalate (as opposed to exacerbate).
Allegedly, the noise in question was the Power Transfer Unit (PTU), which transfers hydraulic power between different systems, and is very normal for Airbus A320 family aircraft.
Thankfully, this situation did not become anything more than it should have.
