A boozed-up traveler on a Kennedy Airport-bound flight was turned into a tape mummy yesterday by fellow passengers who gagged him and bound him to his seat when they got fed up with his drunken shenanigans.
The passenger, who was on a trip from Iceland, “drank all of his duty-free liquor on the flight,” tried to “choke the woman next to him” and was “screaming the plane was going to crash,” according to passenger Andy Ellwood, who snapped the man’s photo and posted it to his blog.
The meltdown — in which the man also spat on several passengers — began when there were about two hours left on the flight, according to Icelandic news outletMbl.is.
He was arrested at JFK after spending the flight’s last two hours with his mouth covered, hands tied behind his back and torso bound to his chair with tape. The man’s name has not been released.
Bizarrely, federal prosecutors declined to prosecute the menace because passengers wouldn’t come forward to detail the man’s threatening behavior to authorities, a source told The Post.
Meanwhile, an American Eagle pilot who smelled like booze while preparing to take off en route to La Guardia was arrested early today at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after failing a Breathalyzer test, local authorities said.
“Somebody detected the smell of what they believed to be alcohol on the pilot’s breath and notified authorities,” airport spokesman Patrick Hogan said.
The pilot, Kolbjorn Jarle Kristiansen, of Raleigh, NC, was arrested on suspicion of flying under the influence and taken to a local hospital for a blood-alcohol content test — which he also failed.
“These incidents are very rare,” Hogan said. “But every few years, we’ll have a case. We have nearly half a million flights come in and out and we have one case every three or four years.”
American Eagle has suspended Kristiansen, 48, pending the outcome of the investigation. In a statement, officials said the company is “cooperating with authorities and conducting a full internal investigation.”
The blood-alcohol content limit for flying is .04 in Minnesota — much stricter than New York’s .08 limit for driving.
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