A PILOT pulled from a flight at Boston’s Logan airport an hour before takeoff planned to end his life in “spectacular fashion”.
The girlfriend, a flight attendant, contacted authorities and the pilot was pulled from a crew lounge about an hour before the 2:30pm ET flight.
At that time, he surrendered a gun he was carrying legally, suggesting he was a member of the Federal Flight Deck Officer program. That program, created after 9/11, arms and deputises pilots as a last line of defence against terrorists. WBZ television reported that Logan’s Federal Security Director George Naccara said earlier reports the pilot had told his girlfriend he was going to crash the plane were “misleading”.
JetBlue said in a statement the pilot was removed from duty for health reasons and no one else was in danger of being harmed. “He never threatened crashing the aircraft,” Mr Naccara said. “It was a situation in which he was threatening to take his own life and, in fact, his words were he may do it in ‘some spectacular fashion’ but not anything to do with the aircraft and no reference to crashing the aircraft or harming anyone else other than himself.”
The pilot is being evaluated at Massachusetts General Hospital.
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