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‘I hope you get eaten by an alligator!’: maskless passenger gets thrown off plane
Flight was forced to divert to Florida
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Your support makes all the difference.A Jetblue flight was forced to divert to Florida to remove a man after he reportedly refused to wear a mask onboard.
As he was finally kicked off the plane, fellow passengers booed him, with one man heard shouting: “I hope you get eaten by an alligator!”
The incident occurred during a New York to Cancun flight on 27 February, reports the Miami Herald, with the plane delayed on the tarmac at Fort Lauderdale airport for around 90 minutes.
Another passenger, Lawrence Redick, filmed the moment the man was escorted off the aircraft and shared the footage on Tiktok.
He wrote in the video captions that one passenger “didn’t wanna wear a mask” and so the plane had to be diverted, calling the experience “frustrating”.
“All this because of one person, it’s so frustrating,” he wrote.
JetBlue said in a statement: “On 27 February, JetBlue flight 751 with scheduled service from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Cancun, Mexico, was forced to divert to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when a customer became aggressive and threatening toward our crew members and other customers after being asked multiple times to comply with JetBlue’s face mask policy and the federal mask mandate.
“The customer was eventually escorted off by law enforcement in Fort Lauderdale.
The following clip contains offensive language
@redickiv Keep ya mask on, it’s dead not that deep 😒 #ASOSFashunWeek #wearamask #plane
♬ original sound - LATER FOUR MUSIC 👨🏾🎤
“The flight continued to Cancun without further incident.”
The airline added that the man was banned from flying with them, saying: “the customer in question is not welcome to fly JetBlue in the future”.
It’s just one in a long line of incidents in which travellers have had to be deplaned after refusing to wear a mandated face covering.
In the summer, a woman was kicked off an American Airlines flight after she refused to wear a face mask onboard the aircraft.
The unnamed female was videoed by a fellow passenger as she was forced to depart the service from Ohio to North Carolina on 19 July.
The footage shows travellers cheering and clapping as she exits the plane.
“You can clap all you want,” the woman can be heard saying as she leaves the flight after gathering up her bags.
“Just leave, we’ve got flights to get,” shouts another passenger.
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