What a maskhole.
An obstinate passenger allegedly caused a three-hour plane delay after repeatedly refusing to wear a mask, which eventually resulted in her getting arrested and wheeled off the aircraft. A video of the incident, originally posted in late August, has amassed 1.2 million views on TikTok after going viral on Tuesday.
Brooklyn DeGumbia — a former Tulsa FOX24 TV reporter who now lives and freelances in NYC — documented the infuriating incident while on a flight from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Hartford, Connecticut, which JetBlue confirmed to The Post.
“On Aug. 24, JetBlue flight 1142 with scheduled service from West Palm Beach to Hartford was delayed before take-off when a customer appeared to be going in and out of consciousness shortly after boarding the aircraft,” a rep for the airline said. “EMTs and law enforcement were requested and assisted the customer off the aircraft.”
The resulting viral video footage, captioned “JetBlue ain’t playin,” starts off with police escorting a woman through the airport in a wheelchair. It then “flashes back” to the offending interaction that allegedly led to her arrest, which began the moment the passenger sat down, DeGumbia, 25, told The Post.
The clip shows the unnamed female passenger, whose face is obscured by a digitally-imposed upside-down smiley face, arguing with two staff members and a police officer aboard the plane over her refusal to don her mask.
“When the flight attendant asked her to pull it up, she said she can’t wear it cause she’s nervous and this is her first time flying alone,” the Brooklyn-based TikToker told The Post. “The attendant said super politely, ‘If you can’t wear your mask you’re gonna have to get off the plane and we’ll find another solution.’ Then she said, ‘OK,’ and put her mask on — then five minutes later she took it down and then the attendant came back over.”
When busted for her PPE-kaboo tactics, the unruly passenger claimed she was going through menopause, DeGumbia said.
“So the attendant brought her water — and then she took it down again,” she added. “Then medics came on and she said ‘I’m fine’ — then she took it down again and refused to get up when they asked her to get off — and during that time she was yelling she had it back on.”
The anti-masker repeatedly cries in the video, “But I haven’t done anything wrong,” adding that her “daughter’s going to college” as an apparent excuse for her behavior.
“You want to make it hard, we’re gonna make it hard,” a safety-vest-wearing member of the flight crew can be heard warning her, before threatening to take everyone off the plane (a threat she made good on later).
The clip then cuts to an in-flight announcement stating that passengers who fail to comply with regulations will be subject to “removal from the aircraft and/or penalties under federal law.”
The in-flight fiasco reportedly took about 90 minutes from when the flight attendant first approached the passenger about her mask to the staff forcing everyone to deplane and the maskhole’s refusal to depart the aircraft after the flight attendant instructed her to do so.
Meanwhile, DeGumbia reported in a follow-up clip that the passenger’s antics resulted in her plane getting delayed three hours, torpedoing her plans to arrive in New York that night.
Suffice it to say, the anti-masker’s behavior didn’t sit well with the peanut gallery, who let the inconsiderate passenger have it on TikTok.
“Unbelievable these people get to waste everyone’s time like this,” lamented one critic.
Another wrote that the passenger’s punishment is “exactly what should happen, EVERY time, without delay—on every airline.”
However, not everyone took the video at face value, with some TikTok skeptics accusing DeGumbia of blurring out the disruptive flyer’s visage to cover up the fact that she was masked. Indeed, the footage depicts another passenger next to the videographer filming the exchange in a smartphone video, which shows the supposed anti-masker wearing a disposable blue face covering.
In the follow-up video, DeGumbia goes into deeper detail about how the passenger would pull her mask up when the flight attendant told her to — and then yank it back down after they walked past.
The videographer concluded the video with a helpful tip: “Don’t play with the TSA, don’t be like this woman, be safe.”
This isn’t the first time an anti-masker has caused a ruckus. A Southwest Airlines passenger was arrested in May for punching a flight attendant — and busting two of her teeth — after she told the flyer to put on a mask. She has since been charged with two felony counts of assault resulting in serious bodily injury and interference with flight crew members and attendants.
