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5 hours ago
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I write thrillers: mostly historical mysteries. In September 2024, I was returning from a literary festival in Italy, where I had been talking about my latest book. It was a Ryanair flight, and as we came in to land at London Stansted, I heard people behind me shouting. I looked back to see some of them were standing up. A moment later a big man – I would guess he was 6ft 4in, and powerfully built – burst through them. He headed towards an emergency exit and lunged for the door handle, screaming. Behind him, a smaller guy was clambering over the tops of the seats, shouting: “It’s not terrorism. It’s not terrorism. Mental health!”
While exit doors can’t be opened when a plane is at full altitude because the air pressure inside is too great, levels dip during descent, and it is possible to open them. I feared that if he opened the exit, the plane would be hard to control and we might hit the ground about 300mph faster than we were meant to.
A woman in the exit aisle was struggling with him, but she couldn’t stop him. I sprinted down and barged my shoulder into his chest, knocking him over. As he collapsed, the smaller man got hold of his shoulder and we dragged him to the floor. The smaller guy – who turned out to be a friend of his – was still yelling “It’s not terrorism” but everyone around us was screaming.
With a third man, we managed to hold the big guy down. His eyes were roving all around and he was breathing as if he was sprinting. He was clearly having a panic attack. I wasn’t worried about his intentions: I thought that if he had wanted to kill us all, he would have gone about it a lot more methodically. But I did check over my shoulder towards the flight deck, just in case it was a diversion tactic so someone could try to get into the cockpit. The aisle was clear, though.
The guy was struggling hard, and it’s difficult to hold a strong man down. I resorted to pinning him down with my shin on his testicles. He quietened down after that, and after a minute he politely asked me to move my leg. I did, just enough – I didn’t want him springing back up.
All the time, his friend was threatening to kick his head in if he didn’t calm down. With hindsight, that probably didn’t help. As this was going on, we could feel the plane descending. A flight attendant was in tears, talking on an internal phone to the captain. She was completely freaked out and trying to explain what was happening. When she managed to get the words out, the plane suddenly pulled back up hard; it felt almost vertical. The captain had said it wasn’t safe to land with so many people out of their seats and the plane would have to circle and try again. By this point the other passengers were quiet: they were strapped into their seats, watching us.
Ten minutes later – it felt like 30 seconds to us – we made another attempt to land, and the people in the seats around us held on to our shirts to brace us. It wasn’t really necessary, because we weren’t actually crashing – but people want to get involved. The wheels touched the tarmac and we were down safely. The big guy was breathing more normally by then. We held him until the police came.
People ask me what I felt. Honestly? I didn’t mind it one bit. I’ve taken many flights and they’re usually quite boring. This really livened things up. Mostly, though, I felt sorry for a man having a mental health episode, even if he could have killed us all.
It was weirdly normal afterwards, getting my bag out of the overhead locker, waiting in the queue of people to amble along the aisle. When we got to the terminal, the ground crew told us that the man had been arrested and would be put on a no-fly list for life. I went home. Afterwards, I thought Ryanair might have said thank you to us, considering that we might have saved the lives of 130 of their passengers and an £85m aeroplane. I’m still waiting for that.
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Murder at Christmas: You Solve the Crime by GB Rubin is available now (Simon & Schuster, £16.99). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
