There’s a bomb, screams jet pilot as passengers wrestle him to the ground

THE captain of a US airliner yelled about a bomb and had to be locked out of the cockpit and restrained as the Las Vegas-bound flight was diverted to Texas, passengers said.

JetBlue Airways said in a statement that the captain of Flight 191 from New York had a “medical situation” and that the pilot in command of the aircraft elected to land in Amarillo about 10 am.

Grant Heppes, a 22-year-old passenger from New York City, said that a man in a JetBlue uniform walked from the cockpit to the back of the plane, but that he started to become disruptive when he was barred from getting back inside.

“Once he got back to the front of the plane I heard him scream, ‘Let me in!’” Heppes said.

Heidi Karg, a passenger on the flight, told CNN that the man was shouting “I need the code, gimme the code, I need to get in there.” The pilot used the announcement system to call for someone to restrain him and some male passengers wrestled him to the ground, she said.

Karg said she thought the man was the captain of the flight but that she wasn’t certain.

“We heard the word ‘bomb,’” Karg said. “We didn’t know exactly what was going on.”

Most of the passengers were “shocked and confused,” Heppes said by phone from the airport at Amarillo.