BUT THE FUN DIDN’T END THERE – CAN YOU SAY EMERGENCY LANDING?

My flight to Atlanta was about 45 minutes late, not a big deal. After I got through passport and immigration – I lost about 10 lbs sweating again. I am so tired of being hot! Ya know, when you think of Russia in January – you assume freezing cold. My experience has been the outdoor temp is comfortable because it is so stinking hot inside

Anyway – got on the flight – and we took off for our 9 ish hour flight.

As we were nearing the second ½ of the flight, a flight attendant came on and asked if there were any medical personnel on board. Hummmm, interesting.

Then, the pilot came on and said that we were going to be making an emergency landing in Canada.

Another announcement asked for more medical personnel and if anyone had one of those machines you use to test your blood if you are diabetic.

Then one of the flight attendants came back and asked a few men to follow her to the front of the plane.

Not knowing what was going on was killing me – so I decided to take a nap.

About an hour later, we landed in Grander, Canada. The pilot told us that several officials would be coming on board to remove the passenger, and we were give strict instructions not to get out of our seats.

I started hearing bits and pieces of what was going on. One of the ‘medical’ people was a medical student (not sure about that, he just looked young) who was sitting behind me. He was talking about the toxic effects of booze and drugs. Several were commenting on Ambien…heard someone saying something about this guy drinking what he purchased through the Duty Free stores (which is a big no-no).

Come to find out that this passenger was a Russian man. According to one of the guys who was helping ‘he wasn’t very nice, his wife did not de-plane with him’. The bad guy had taken some ecstasy and drank a bottle of vodka. He accosted one of the female flight attendants.- she told him to stop or he would be arrested, the guy became belligerent, punched the male flight attendant, was going crazy. They hog-tied him with those plastic on-board handcuff things, and he broke out of them like they were made of cotton candy.

It took 5 men to keep this one man contained. I guess he started to convulse – which is why they were looking for a way to check his blood levels. Then, he passed out.

He came to as he was being hauled off the plane and became very mad – apparently he kicked out the window of the ambulance.

Yikes! Glad I was sitting in the back of the plane!

This whole episode caused us to be 4 hours late to Atlanta. Of course, I missed my connecting flight into SB. And of course, it took 2-3 hours to get my luggage (this is AFTER I went through customs, immigration and security!).

Anyway – it’s 2am, and I am with pizza at a Days Inn. Going to catch the 10am flight home tomorrow morning.