Earlier this week a Jet Blue Pilot went crazy in mid-air during a flight from New York to Vegas. The Pilot was locked out of the cockpit by the co-pilot after the Pilot began acting strange and then proceeded to run down the aisles screaming things about bombs and Afghanistan. The passengers did a great job subduing the pilot until the plane could make an emergency landing and the pilot was taken into custody.
Everyone is speculating why the pilot snapped since it seems that he has a good record and no info has surfaced yet of prior incidents. There have been other incidents where flight attendants have also snapped recently. My theory of the rash of flight insanity is that these incidents are being caused by sleep aids such as Ambien and Lunesta. These popular sleep aids have a history of making people do some pretty weird crap like sleep eating and driving, which I call my drive home from work. I have personal experience with bad reactions to these medications so I have a feeling that it may come out that this pilot and the other flight attendants had been taking these sleep-aids. It makes sense because these pilots are working long, odd hours in different time-zones and you mix that with the combination of stress, constant altitude/air pressure changes, and these unpredictable sleep-aids you end up with a recipe for a cocktail of crazy that you don’t want your flight attendant bringing you.
I’m really surprised more pilots and flight attendants haven’t lost it. How would you like to go to work every day and deal with the TSA multiple times. I almost lose it every time I have to take off my shoes, on a side note, taking off my shoes is in the top 3 reasons I hate Radical Muslims. Going to work every day through the TSA checkpoints would be like you having to go through the DMV everyday to get to your job, nothing but lines and a-holes before you have your first cup of coffee. The post traumatic stress of 9/11 in the back of these pilots and flight crew’s heads can’t be easy and having to deal with the increase number of rookie rude fliers would be below average. Telling everybody to turn off their cell phone would get old in a hurry but maybe that is why they have you turn off your phones, it has nothing to do with the phones effecting the electronics on the plane, it is probably all those phones, tablets, computers in close quarters kicking off as much radiation as wearing microwave as a hat that could drive the flight crew crazy.
All I know is that it won’t surprise me if more of these incidents happen and we end up replacing the term “Going Postal’ with “Going Pilot”.
I agree with your ambien theory and I believe many others suspect it too, but they keep quiet out of fear of their own sleep aid being taken off the market. Everybody’s on it, including the lawyers, judges and politicians. I also have had a very bad experience with this incredibly dangerous, science-fiction like drug, and it’s taken me three years to get some semblance of a normal life back after the consequences for a totally non premeditated event. Glad I didn’t kill someone or myself as other ambien victims have. God save the ambien users.