Flying is pretty stressful, even if police officers don’t appear to forcibly remove you from your seat for no good reason. The passengers on Delta Airlines Flight 129 were witness to a similarly stressful situation recently, but this time the whole thing is even more incomprehensible.
According to KIRO 7, our most recent airline horror story begins in the first class cabin of a seemingly normal Delta flight from Seattle to Beijing. One of the passengers on the flight was 23-year-old Joseph Daniel Hudek IV, who had a first-class ticket thanks to his mother, who works for Delta. Hudek appeared normal at the beginning of the flight for about an hour; Hudek ordered a beer and then went to the bathroom. He did not seem intoxicated and only ordered the one beer.
This is when things got a little, well, crazy.
Apparently, Hudek went inside the bathroom, immediately walked out again to ask a flight attendant something, and then returned to the bathroom. After about two minutes, he charges out of out the bathroom and heads straight to the emergency exit, where he then begins attempting to open it while the plane is in the air. According to some Delta staff, Hudek managed to open the handle about halfway.
A pair of flight attendants rushed to stop him, but he fought them off. Another flight attendant alerts the pilot, who decides at this moment to reroute the plane back to Seattle.
By this point, other passengers have begun trying to help the flight attendants stop Hudek. So, naturally, Hudek finds a bottle of wine and slams it against a passenger’s head. As if that wasn’t enough, he also punches a bunch of other passengers and literally tries to choke someone.
It was at this point that one brave flight attendant decided he’d had enough and grabs two full bottles of wine and hits the enraged Hudek over the head with them. At least one of the bottles breaks. Hudek, who by now sounds thoroughly insane, apparently didn’t even feel the effects of a one liter bottle of wine breaking over his head. At this point, he shouted: “Do you know who I am!?”
Finally, someone on the flight crew was able to restrain this asshole in a headlock and the plane landed safely back in Seattle. His hands were ziptied and he was placed in a wheelchair to be brought to the authorities. But did you really think Hudek was going to go down without a fight? Do you not know who he is? "He started yelling for help," Dustin Jones, a passenger on the flight who sat near Hudek, said. "And so he turned the wheelchair over in the middle of the airport, screaming for people to help him, just being belligerent."
Hudek appeared in court in Seattle on Friday; he’s been charged with interfering with a flight crew, which is a federal crime that comes with a cool $250,000 fine and could send him to prison for up to 20 years.
