South Korea’s biggest airline has defended its staff after the US pop singer Richard Marx said he had helped restrain a violent passenger during a flight and accused the crew of being “ill trained” to deal with incidents of air rage.
Marx, who had several hits in the 1980s and 90s, said he and his wife, the TV host Daisy Fuentes, were on a Korean Air flight from the Vietnamese capital Hanoi to Seoul on Tuesday when a male passenger assaulted the person sitting next to him.
After female cabin attendants spent four hours attempting to subdue the man, Marx, 53, and another male passenger stepped in and tied him up with a rope.
Photographs on Fuentes’s Instagram page showed the passenger, a 34-year-old South Korean, grabbing a flight attendant’s hair while another attendant pointed a Taser at him.
The business class passenger, who has not been named, reportedly became argumentative and then violent after drinking two and a half glasses of whisky with his meal.
“Passenger next to us attacked passengers and crew. Crew completely ill trained,” Marx said on Twitter.
You will be hearing about our flight#480 on @KoreanAir_KE . Passenger next to us attacked passengers and crew. Crew completely ill trained.
— Richard Marx (@richardmarx) December 20, 2016
Fuentes wrote on Instagram that the flight attendants did not appear to know how to use a Taser or secure the passenger with a rope, and that they “never fully got control of him”.
“When he started pushing the female staff and pulling them by the hair, [Marx] was the first to help subdue him. This went on for four hours. I feel horrible for the abuse the staff had to endure but no one was prepared for this.”
The passenger was arrested at Incheon airport near Seoul and charged with assault and breaking aviation security laws.
“My wife and I are safe but one crew member and two passengers were injured. The all-female crew was clueless and not trained as to how to restrain this psycho,” Marx wrote on Facebook. “Korean Air should be sanctioned for not knowing how to handle a situation like this without passenger interference.”
He said he and Fuentes had arrived home in Los Angeles after the “chaotic and dangerous event”, adding that he wasn’t a hero but “just did what I would hope anyone would do in the same situation”.
A spokesman for Korean Air told the Korea Herald said that the Taser had not been used because of the risk it posed to nearby passengers. “The flight crew responded to the situation according to the proper protocol,” he said.
The incident came two days before unionised Korean Air pilots begin a 10-day strike over failed salary negotiations. The walkout will cause the cancellation of more than 130 flights between 22-31 December, Yonhap news agency said.
