A woman on a flight to Edinburgh went ballistic when she was told she couldn’t have her own parachute or smoke cigarettes on her flight. That’s when the prosthetic leg came off and the terror started. If this were a Lifetime movie, it would be called Legs On a Plane and would star Aviva Drescher. Unfortunately, this is real life.
The woman, who was only said to be 48 and unemployed (is this a standard thing that is reported by the police?) had apparently been spoiling for a fight even before she boarded the plane that was returning to Edinburgh from Tunisia. She had already had an altercation on the bus to the airport and was drinking heavily, according to other passengers. While that’s normal (I was on a flight to Las Vegas in June where a drunk person kicked my seat for an hour like some kind of colicky baby), what happened next wasn’t: The angry, drunk, unemployed woman started slapping passengers, making unreasonable demands and assaulting cabin crew with her prosthetic leg, which had to be taken from her for everyone’s safety. Too bad everyone forgot that she had one non-prosthetic leg, too, because she started kicking up a storm with that.
Here’s an eyewitness account of the incident, via the Edinburgh Evening News:
Father-of-two labourer John [Smith] said last night: “We were coming back from Tunisia when this lady kicked off. She was off her face on drink.
“She was shouting ‘I want cigarettes’ and that she wanted a parachute to jump off the plane.
“She slapped a young girl and then assaulted the cabin crew with her prosthetic leg.
“They took it off her, but she started kicking them with her good leg.
“It sounds funny, but it was not a laughing matter at the time. It was serious. She was totally drunk. It was pretty shocking.”
It may have been funnier sooner than Smith expected, though, because apparently the woman was escorted off the plane (which had made an emergency landing) to a rousing chorus of the “Hokey Cokey” song, which sounds just as rude to sing to a drunk one-legged woman as it is to demand cigarettes and a parachute, to be honest.
Passengers were frustrated that they had to wait for an hour until after the woman was removed by police to be on their way again, but in the end everyone got home safely and soundly. (Or they got to the airport, at least. Don’t know what they did after.)The woman who kicked off the incident was taken into custody. No word on whether her leg would be returned to her.
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