The horror brawl erupted aboard a Jet2 plane flying between Turkey and Manchester last week, and one passenger has now revealed how the chaotic scenes took shape
A “shocking and frightening” brawl that broke out aboard a Jet2 flight started when a bald man asked passengers a bizarre question, one person on the plane has claimed.
In a now viral video shared last week, people were seen trading punches in an all-out brawl aboard a flight travelling from Antalya, Turkey to Manchester, with one passenger seen allegedly hurling racist insults at someone recording the altercation on their phone. The dramatic exchange, during which two people were seen grabbing at the phone and another passenger’s face culminated in airline bans for two of the people involved.
Another passenger has explained what the scuffle – which eventually drew in an entire crowd, including a woman who rose from her seat, and shouts of “get back” from others – began with one man’s drunken question.
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An insider told the Daily Mail the chaos was started by a bald man, who appeared to have recently undergone a hair transplant. The 21-year-old said he had loudly started asking passengers whether they wanted to listen to music, describing both his and a fellow traveller’s behaviour as not “normal” as it appeared they had been drinking.
They said: “Some people said yes because he was already being so loud. I think him and another bloke had definitely been drinking before or on the flight because their behaviour just wasn’t normal.”
The source, who preferred to remain anonymous, said the man eventually became so disruptive that cabin crew were forced to step in and ask him to turn the music down. They added the man failed to stop when asked however, and shouted back at the Jet2 staffer.
They said he ended up “swearing and shouting”, adding: “She went and got her supervisor but he was being so rude, just swearing and shouting at her, I’ve not seen anything like it.”
A taste of the foul language can be seen in the video, which shows the man calling someone behind a phone camera a “Muslim mug” and a “f***ing mug” some time after the initial incident, when the same man allegedly swore at the cameraman’s mum. He told the Mail the disruptive passenger had “kept on asking me if I wanted to fight”, adding: “But then he called me a Muslim mug.”
The insider added the fighting started soon after, with fellow passengers accusing the man of “being racist” as others pulled out their own phones to film the chaos.
He said: “This is when everyone began shouting and fighting, some more people were filming now and people were just asking him: ‘Why are you being racist?’” The video captures other passengers intervening, with one pushing the man away, and and another placing his companion in a headlock.
The disruption only ended, he said, when the plane was forced to divert and land in Brussels, with police taking 20 minutes to board and detain the man and another male passenger.
The Daily Mirror has approached Jet2 for comment.