When it comes to the article of Cockpit Resource Management, this is something of a case study:
Indian newspaper The Times of India reports that the pilot, Captain Ranbir Arora and co-pilot, Aditya Chopra, on flight IC 884 got into a full-blown brawl with two members of the cabin crew, a man and a woman.
The crew claimed that the pilots had sexually harassed a 24-year-old air stewardess, while the pilots alleged that a male member of the crew, Amit Khanna had misbehaved and endangered safety. They said that the air stewardess falsified a complaint of sexual harassment to distract attention from Khanna’s misconduct. No one denied the slugfest. During the scuffle, the cockpit was reportedly left unmanned for a time, as the aircraft flew over Pakistani territory.
This, by the way, was on an international flight rather than a commuter route.
You take some things for granted.
I wonder what was going through the minds of the passengers. I mean, had I been there and also availed myself of the adult beverages, I might have found this amusing, and cheered on one or another participant, until I counted people wearing uniforms and thought, “Wait! Is anybody flying this thing?”
Just have to be careful which airlines you fly. Air India, no soup for you.
In my mind I’m seeing an AIRPLANE like spoof coming. Brawlywood.
Ah, a new kind of in-flight entertainment!
Ladies and Gentlemen, we hoped you enjoyed the fight..uh..flight!
Hmmm. Me Mongo. Me fly!
imagine the outcome if Otto had decided to take a break from flying about that time…..
Kind of makes the oops by the NWA pilots pale some in comparison.
In the way back (when our jets were gray over white), we had two of our Aircrew fist fight each other in the cockpit of an S-3. They were flying from Cecil Field to Norfolk to deliver a bunch of items to the Carrier we were going to deploy on in a few weeks. They were so busy trading punches that the aircraft tumbled out of space for a good 15K feet and pulling the Hoover out of the dive tore both ESM wing tip pods off the aircraft as well as the right aft external avionics bay door (about a 3 square foot piece of skin). I spent a weekend flying in Army National Guard UH-1 Heuys looking for those two ESM Pods, the receivers inside were classified. The best that ATC could tell us was that they came off somewhere over the Great Dismal swamp. Fruitless search.
Both guys ‘claimed’ the aircraft just went ‘nuts’ and fell out of the sky on its own. But they could not adequately explain the fat lips, broken nose and black eyes nor the roughed up knuckles on their hands since most of the punches they were throwing were hitting their helmets. They were around only a couple of more weeks before they ‘moved on’. Rumor floating around the squadron about a woman or wife or daughter. Not sure.
BT: Jimmy T sends.
A weekend in an Army UH-1? The shame, Oh the shame.
Complain if you will about flight delays and lost luggage. At least it beats the heck out of fisticuffs at 30,000 feet with an empty cockpit.
U.S. passengers may laugh at Air India’s smackdown over Pakistan but it wasn’t that long ago we had Northwest flight 188. They weren’t fighting but they sure as heck weren’t flying.
Glass houses and such.