‘Warrior’ passenger arrested after hitting flight attendant with intercom phone, Frontier Airlines says

CNN
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A “belligerent” passenger who was asked to leave a flight departing from Denver was later arrested for hitting an airline employee with an intercom phone, Frontier Airlines said in a statement Sunday.

While Frontier Airlines Flight 708 was waiting for an early Sunday departure to Tampa from Denver International Airport, the airline’s main hub, the female passenger “became belligerent on board and was asked to fly,” the statement said. “As she was on her way, she picked up an intercom phone and hit a flight attendant with it.”

Denver police arrested the woman and the plane left for Tampa around 5:30 a.m. local time, according to Frontier. The flight left Denver nearly four hours late, according to FlightAware tracking data.

It is not clear what behavior led to the passenger being asked to leave the plane in the first place. CNN has reached out to Denver police for more information.

Denver International Airport told CNN in an email Sunday that it “unfortunately” did not “have information about the flight.”

In November, a Frontier Airlines flight from Cincinnati made an emergency landing in Atlanta after a passenger, who was later arrested, was seen with a cutter, an airline spokesman said.

The passenger had an extra cutter in his carry-on, the Transportation Security Administration told CNN at the time.

The Federal Aviation Authority has received reports of at least 670 unruly passengers in 2023 as of May 14, the US transportation agency’s statistics showed.

There were 2,455 unruly passengers reported in 2022, according to the FAA.