Austin, Texas
“Then she says ‘sorry, I’m going through (a) divorce,’ ” Reiss wrote. “Ummmm uh oh.”
Reiss told BuzzFeed that other passengers even sympathized with “oh’s and aw’s” — at first.
But as her speech veered from her personal life into a string of non sequiturs, the mood aboard the San Francisco-bound jet turned from cozy to uncomfortable, to worse.
“She’s like ‘I don’t care if you voted for Trump or Clinton. They’re both (expletive),” Reiss wrote. He started shaking, he wrote, after the pilot said she was about to take off.
“So I’ll stop and we’ll fly the airplane,” she says in another passenger’s video. “Don’t worry. I’m going to let my co-pilot fly it. He’s a man.”
Reiss got out of his seat, collected his bag and made for the exit. “Half the flight followed my lede,” he wrote.
“OK, if you don’t feel safe get off the airplane, but otherwise we can go,” the pilot says in the video, still cheerful, as her passengers begin to revolt.
“Did I offend you?” she says to someone in first class.
“Disarm the doors,” a flight attendant says.
Reiss posted a photo of a police officer standing by after the pilot followed her passengers back to the terminal. Reiss wrote that she hugged him before they parted. She offered to write a book with him. She had been crying.
A new flight crew took the plane to San Franscisco the same day.
