A violent fist fight broke out between two male passengers aboard an All Nippon Airways flight and another passenger caught it all on camera.
The video of the brawl has since disappeared, but the incident still got a lot of publicity and went viral before the video went down.
The plane was about to fly from Tokyo's Narita International Airport to the Los Angeles International Airport, but a brawl broke out between two men just 10 minutes before takeoff. A man in a red shirt simply turned around all of a sudden and told another passenger in a gray shirt that he was "going to kill him," then started throwing punches.
Violent Brawl Aboard ANA Plane
Corey Hour, an Arizona-based photographer, director and cinematographer, was aboard the same flight and caught the whole incident on camera. Hour also posted several tweets about the brawl.
So, 10 minutes before take off a passenger starts a huge fight in his row. I get in between him and flight attendants, but he won't 1v1 me.
— Corey Hour (@CoreyHour) May 1, 2017
It remains unclear just what triggered the brawl, and Hour says that he spoke to other passengers as well, but nobody knows what caused the fight. At one point, the guy in the gray shirt screamed for help, saying that the guy in the red shirt, who attacked him, was crazy. The man in the red shirt yelled "I'll kill you."
Before being removed, the video showed the man in the red shirt throwing punches at the passenger in the gray shirt, as other passengers tried to get out of the way. ANA staff eventually separated the two men, but it wasn't easy. The flight attendants had a hard time breaking off the two men, and one of them was caught up in the fight, which is when Hour says he put down the camera and intervened. Several flight attendants eventually managed to move the violent passenger toward the front of the plane, where he started shouting something about America.
'You Think I'm Crazy? What About The Government?'
"You think I'm crazy? What about the government?" the man in the red shirt yelled before exiting the plane, according to Hour.
Japan Today reports that after exiting the plane, the violent passenger choked a male ANA employee. Authorities eventually arrested the man and charged him with assault. Police identified him as a 44-year-old American man.
The brawl caused the flight to suffer a delay of roughly an hour and a half, but the plane eventually took off to its destination.
ANA is a major Japan airline and for the past two years, it has won Skytrax's "Best Airline Staff in Asia" award. Hour also praised ANA staff for how they handled the whole incident.
"For the record ANA staff and passengers handled the situation with grace and respect," said Hour. "They did the best they could to diffuse the situation."
That seems to be the opposite of how United Airlines handles its passengers, as the airline recently went under fire after dragging and bloodying a passenger while removing him from an overbooked flight. The passenger was David Dao, a doctor who had booked his flight in due time and paid for the fare, only to be dragged off the plane because United had overbooked the flight.
