A brawl broke out on a Jet2 flight from Turkey to Britain on Thursday, forcing the pilot to land in Brussels and resulting in the removal of two passengers.
The fight, captured in dramatic videos shared widely on social media, happened in the air after the flight took off from Antalya, Turkey, en route to Manchester. The plane was diverted to Brussels three hours into a roughly five-hour flight. Police boarded the plane in Brussels and removed two passengers, who are now banned from the airline for life, according to a statement from Jet2.
The statement attributed the fight to “the appalling behavior of two disruptive passengers.”
“We will also vigorously pursue them to recover the costs that we incurred as a result of this diversion,” the statement said. “As a family friendly airline, we take a zero-tolerance approach to disruptive passenger behavior, and we are very sorry that other customers and our colleagues onboard had to experience this too.”
Jet2, a British budget airline, is no stranger to banning and fining those who cause in-air disruptions. In 2022, the airline billed two brothers £50,000 (about $68,000 at current exchange rates) and handed them a lifetime ban after their violent behavior reportedly led to a flight diversion. And a couple was banned from flying with Jet2 in 2017 after a disagreement turned physical and also forced the flight to divert.
Incidents of so-called “air rage” rose in 2021, when passengers returned to the skies after an extended quarantine period during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration saw a 400 percent increase in these types of midair outbursts from 2019 to 2025.
Wendy Patrick, a prosecutor and behavioral expert, said in an email that the cramped conditions on many modern airplanes leads to air rage developing quickly. In some cases, she said, the attempts of other passengers and flight crew to de-escalate the situation can only make it worse.
Multiple passengers appeared to be involved in Thursday’s brawl, with men and women of various ages crowding into the aisle of the plane. Punches were thrown, glasses were plucked off one man’s face and screams reverberated through the cabin.
At one point, according to the videos, a flight attendant stood on a seat and appealed to passengers to stop fighting as a man in front of her held another man in a headlock.
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Claire Fahy reports on New York City and the surrounding area for The Times.
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