Passengers bind, gag fellow passenger
 

Not sure if this was the right way to handle it, but without air marshals and two hours into the flight, it's certainly effective Things Not to do on a Flight #27 – Grope Women and Choke Guys | Meeja

You can't tell from the picture if the gag covers mouth and nose. That's something to be very careful about - you can end up with a corpse. That happened with the Met police a few years back where they covered a woman's nose and mouth with tape and she suffocated. No prosecutions, of course.

Given some of the stuff they are confiscating at the moment it begs the question who and how did they get that tape and the cable ties on the plane!

P.S. This has to be a spoof anyway :D

AP ran the story. Also San Diego Union Tribune

Icelandic airline restrains man on flight to NYC | UTSanDiego.com

I'm a bit skeptical of that photo, and if he were indeed trussed up like that I doubt any crew worth their training would have allowed him to be so for very long- almost anyone flying now knows that you are not permitted to gag a restrained passenger... at least not in any of the airlines I have flown for (reasons as given- to ensure integrity of the airway and so they can tell you if anything is wrong medically)

Or do they really do things differently in Europe?

Other sources claim that the passenger was spitting onto fellow passengers which could explain the tape over the mouth.

I guess they have different rules then. In past airline training, it didn't matter what they were screaming we were not to cover their mouth. Period. If they were spitting or biting then restraining them to the seatback and moving other pax away was the only allowable option. Interesting that the airline will not confirm the picture, I wondered if it was a sppof or hoax when I first saw it without the story...

Rules and reality... to gag or not to gag?
 

It's fairly obvious (to me) that the passenger has been secured by the cabin crew (no doubt with help from pax). Visible cable tie around the knees, hands secured behind his back (possibly more cable ties), ankles secured, and upper body secured to the seat both above and under the armpits. Can't see the seatbelt; may be hidden by his gut.

Pretty good effort, IMHO. Not sure what Iceland air has as part of their passenger restraint kits, but I'd not be at all suprised if there were cable ties and gaffer tape.

As for the gag...

My airline (Oz regional) doesn't permit gagging of passengers, and I doubt that many others do. Our rules state that the passenger should be restrained, supervised and other pax moved away from that passenger.

All well and good, but for two things. Firstly there may not be that many spare seats, leaving pax within spitting/abuse distance. But the biggie is the abuse that a drunk can deal out, non-stop, for hours, and the effect it may have on the rest of the passengers, and the cabin crew.

Very few people can ignore shouted abuse for very long before they're affected by it. Don't believe me? How many times have you or people around you get angry by the sound of a crying baby in the row behind? But a crying baby is nothing compared to continued, vindictive, directed abuse at various people, including you when it's your turn.

Drunks can keep this crap up for hours. IMHO, if a passenger continues a tirade of abuse to all and sundry, within 30 minutes some of the other passengers will become agitated. Within an hour or so some of them may want to do 'something about it'.

So the CC may have gagged the passenger for his own benefit.

Just my thoughts.

If the CC gagged him, one must assume that they kept checking the airway was clear....Awfully dodgy thing to do, though.

If the bloke gets drunk & makes other passengers journey miserable at best and potentially dangerous then he can take the risk with the restraints AND the gag. No body asked him to become a drunken ass.

I'm astonished that he was later released without charge, supposedly because none of the passengers wanted to make a complaint. Why wouldn't the airline make one ?

It does seem strange. Especially given that in many countries, after being restrained like that and then not charged, one could presumably then turn around and claim deprivation of liberty.... (they DID land in the US of A after all) Must be more to the story...?

Which is why one must be absolutely sure of the circumstances and have captain's go-ahead to do something like this. *If* the pax took it upon themselves & intitiated a restraint (as it sort of sounds like by the descriptions given) then they could have opened a whole legal can of worms for sure

I suspect that, even in the litigious USA, the alleged miscreant would have been advised to quit while he was ahead. :)

Trouble is, Load Toad, that if the gagging leads to reaching the destination with a corpse, whoever did it is likely to be in deep sh*t!

"Honest guv, he tripped down the stairs."

But have they been trained by the Metropolitan Police so that they know that excuse?

It's on the BBC now: BBC News - Who, What, Why: Is it legal to restrain air passengers?

Great article!

Like I said, sometimes you may have to restrain a passenger for his/her own safety from the other pax.

Look at the windows behind the gagged man. Which aircraft flys around at that pitch ?

That's the leading edge of the wing isn't it? Not the horizon.