A Southwest Airlines jet approaches Love Field Airport in 2016 in Dallas. (Tony Gutierrez/AP)
Here’s your semimonthly update on plane fights, people trying to yank open the doors of planes in midair, and other forms of miscellaneous plane violence that keep happening and ending up on video for some reason.
Leading this roundup: a fight onboard a Southwest Airlines flight Friday at Dallas’s Love Field.
An anonymous video tagged “#WalmartoftheSkies” shows a man in a sweatshirt punching wildly at another man, forcing him to retreat into a window seat beneath the blows.
Most passengers fled the pummeling, jostling through the aisles toward the front of the plane. But a third man, still wearing a neck pillow, stood up and confronted the punch-thrower.
The pillow man screamed something unintelligible, to which the sweatshirt man responded with expletives.
The sweatshirt man then punched the pillow man in the head several times, until the pillow flew off his neck.
More people screamed. A bystander eventually got the assailant into a chokehold and dragged him back toward the camera. Then the video ended.
Dallas police said they detained someone after the incident but provided no details. Southwest did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post, but the airline told the Daily Mail that the Los Angeles-bound flight had been delayed by the altercation.
Friday’s incident is believed to be the first significant melee on a Southwest flight traveling specifically from Dallas to California since May, when a flight attendant was dog-piled after landing in Burbank.
[A brawl on a Southwest Airlines jet ended with a dogpile on a flight attendant]
Moving on to attempted door breachings — the most recent incident took place on Monday’s SkyWest flight from San Francisco to Boise.
The Idaho Statesman reports that an anxious-looking woman who had been rambling about “God” and “data” got up from her first-class seat and tried to pry open the cabin door.
A passenger overheard her say that she thought the plane had already landed.
The woman was detained by police after the flight landed, the Statesman reported. She was handed over to health officials.
Because the Boise passenger never came close to getting the door open, the incident is a relatively minor one in the genre of passengers trying to jump out of planes. The Post wrote last summer about a man who was so persistent that a flight attendant beat him away from the door with a wine bottle.
[A flight attendant smashed wine bottles on a man who tried to open the exit midair, FBI says]
In disgusting plane news — it’s been relatively quiet on the broken toilet front since January. The Washington Post was unable last month to confirm reports of a fart-induced assault on a Dubai-to-Amsterdam flight. There have been no recent reports of in-plane bedbug infestations, though we will keep our eye out as we move toward the summer bedbug season.
No mass vomitings have been reported since last week’s nor’easter.
Stay tuned for updates.