A United Airlines flight attendant has been removed from flight duties after a crew member was caught on camera inflating and using a plane’s emergency exit slide to deplane an aircraft.
Footage of the incident was recorded from a terminal at Houston’s Bush International Airport on Monday.
The video appears to show a woman open the plane’s door and drop a pair of bags 4.5 metres down to the tarmac before sliding down to retrieve them.
Passengers on the plane are said to have exited the plane normally.
“That’s insane. Why?” traveler Sharon Lovedahl said. “Why would she do that?”
That’s the question the airline and investigators are asking.
Neither has revealed any motivation or reason for the breach of protocol.
The flight attendant’s decision to exit the plane in such a dramatic, and seemingly unnecessary fashion, is similar to one a JetBlue worker also made.
In 2010, Steven Slater, a flight attendant for the low-cost airline JetBlue, allegedly got into an argument with a passenger before grabbing two cans of beer, sliding down the emergency slide, and running across the tarmac to his car located in the employee parking lot.