I posted about the incident where passengers on a British charter flight refused to let the airplane take off until two men were removed. The BBC has an update to the story, and there was even more to the passenger's disquiet than just the inappropriate behavior.
David Wearden, 42, from Chester, said it was reports that the pair had been overheard claiming they had 30 minutes left to live which led to concerns.
He denied passengers had "mutinied" and demanded the men's removal, saying the atmosphere onboard had been "quiet".
The men, who reportedly looked Arabic, were later cleared to travel.
They were allowed to fly back to the UK on another flight.
'Quiet unease'
Mr Wearden, who was returning from a nine-day holiday with his wife and three children, said the first he became aware anything unusual was happening was as the plane was due to take off and "the family in front of us just got off".
"We were all very puzzled by what was going on. There was no announcement," he said.
The financial services lawyer said there was a feeling of "quiet unease" and children began panicking.
"There wasn't any collective action. There was no shouting or demands for those people to be taken off at all. It was very calm.
"Most people were still very much on the plane, but people were upset by what was going on."
Pilot's actions
The captain then spoke to the two men and returned to the cockpit with their passports, said Mr Wearden.
"We were then asked to get off the plane and go back to the airport where they did a full security check."
It was then, he said, that his wife Susanne began talking to another passenger who said she had sat next to the two men.
"She said she had heard them saying it was the last 30 minutes of their lives," said Mr Wearden.
Were the two men joking? Who knows at this point. Let me just tell a little anecdote here. I once took a training course from a guy who had worked for years in the area of engineering change documentation. One of the very important documents in any engineering design is a Bill Of Materials, commonly called a BOM. The instructor told me he had once been traveling through an airport discussing how to document and track changes to the BOM when he suddenly was stopped, detained and searched. Because, of course, people heard "bomb" not "BOM".
That was long before 9/11.
I have a pretty off-beat sense of humor, but I'm not stupid enough to joke about things like that in today's climate.
Same thing happened to another engineer in my office: He was coming back from DFW carrying a ‘fuse pin’ (basically a bolt in a structural assembly designed to fail at a certain load, preventing more widespread damage to the assembly). He ruefully admits that he should have told the security guy who asked what it was, ‘That’s a bolt.’ But he wasn’t thinking…
Engineers – we just tell it like it is!
“She said she had heard them saying it was the last 30 minutes of their lives,”
Uhm… anyone else heard it? Or she just saw two arab guys, sitting and talking quietly, and she went “oh my god we gonna die” and then she swears she heard them say this..
When she actually heard something they said in arabic.
In the late 60′s I had some contacts with weapons designers at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. At least one of them said someone he knew there had said, in an airport, replying to the “so what kind of work do you do?”, that he was a bomb designer–with the expected reaction by airport security.
We also knew never to greet someone in an airport by saying “Hi, Jack!”