Bombing Attempt On American Airlines Flight 63
On December 22, 2001, passengers on Flight 63 from Paris, France to Miami, Florida a passenger complained of a smoke smell in the cabin shortly after a meal service. One flight attendant, Hermis Moutardier, thinking she smelled a burnt match, walked the aisles of the plane, trying to assess the source. A passenger pointed to Reid, who was sitting alone near a window and attempting to light a match. Moutardier warned him that smoking was not allowed on the airplane. Reid then promised to stop.
A few minutes later, Moutardier found Reid leaned over in his seat. Her attempts to get his attention failed. After asking "What are you doing?" Reid grabbed at her, revealing one shoe in his lap, a fuse which led into the shoe, and a lit match. She tried grabbing Reid twice, but he pushed her to the floor each time, and she yelled for help, and then ran to get water. When another flight attendant, Cristina Jones, arrived to try to subdue him, he fought her and bit her thumb and Moutardier threw water in his face. The 6 foot 4 inch (193 cm) tall, 200+ pound (90+ kg) Reid was next subdued by several passengers on the airliner, and then bound up using plastic handcuffs, seatbelt extensions, and headphone cords. A physician on board the airliner administered to Reid a tranquilizer that he found in the emergency medical kit of the airliner. This flight was immediately diverted to the Logan International Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, the closest US airport.
The explosive apparently did not detonate due to the one-day delay in the take-off of Reid's flight. He had worn his shoes for more than one day, and the rainy weather, perhaps along with Reid's accumulated foot perspiration, caused the fuse to be too damp to ignite.
Read more about this topic: Richard Reid
Famous quotes containing the words bombing, attempt, american and/or flight:
“Did all of us feel interested in bombing buildings only when the men we slept with were urging us on?”
—Jane Alpert (b. 1947)
“The ignorant are a reservoir of daring. It almost seems that those who have yet to discover the known are particularly equipped for dealing with the unknown. The unlearned have often rushed in where the learned feared to tread, and it is the credulous who are tempted to attempt the impossible. They know not whither they are going, and give chance a chance.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)