AP
- An American Airlines passenger jumped from an emergency exit after a 30-minute delay.
- People were told to remain onboard temporarily after the flight's cancellation but one man refused.
- He reportedly crawled over passengers. A spokesperson told Insider he was immediately detained.
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An American Airlines passenger was detained on Friday after leaping out of a plane's emergency exit while it was still at Charlotte Douglas International Airport.
The flight to Baltimore was cancelled due to severe weather after 172 passengers and six crew members boarded the plane.
After the cancellation, passengers were instructed to remain on board for at least 30 minutes, according to Brandon Goldner, a reporter at Charlotte's WCNC, who was on the plane.
"So a passenger had enough and crawled over us in the exit row and let himself out. They got him by the jet bridge," Goldner said in a tweet with a photo of the open emergency exit.
-Brandon Goldner (@BrandonWCNC) July 2, 2021
Instead of waiting for the jet bridge to be repositioned, "a passenger opened the over-wing emergency exit and jumped onto the ramp," an American Airlines spokesperson told Insider on Saturday.
The airline said the passenger was "immediately detained" by American team members, then placed into custody by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police.
The customer has since been placed on American's internal refuse list pending further investigation.
In June, a passenger was hospitalized after forcing open an exit door and jumping out while it was taxiing away from the gate at Los Angeles International Airport, per Insider's Joshua Zitser.