We’ve all been there, sitting on a plane for an excruciatingly long time, waiting for it to taxi to the gate, or waiting for it to do something mysterious—whatever it is it doesn’t much matter to you in the moment. You just want it to be all over. A passenger in Malaga, Spain, was feeling this way on New Year’s Day after a thirty minute wait for his plane to reach a gate. Instead of standing around hunched over and daring the people across the aisle to jump out before he could, he just used the emergency exit. He was tired of waiting, after all.
Looks like someone didn’t pay attention to the informative safety lesson given by stewards the world over before every commercial flight. See, once you get out on to the wing, there really isn’t anywhere else to go, unless you deploy those fun, inflatable ramp things. The police were called after the passenger was persuaded to come back inside. Fernando Del Valle Villalobos, another passenger, captured video of the incident, telling the Associated Press that he was “astonished.”
From the AP:
[Del Valle] said the passengers were standing in the aisle waiting to get off the plane when the man “very calmly asked permission to get past, opened the emergency exit, looked out, saw the wing, went back for his back-pack.”
Later, he said the captain came out and asked the man why he had done it and del Valle heard him say clearly that he was sick of waiting inside. The passengers, except the man in question, were kept a further 15 minutes on the plane before being let off.
Police said Wednesday that they have opened a complaint against the man for breaching security.
The Ryanair plane had flown in from London Stansted Airport, about a three hour flight, which isn’t bad as far as flights go. Sometimes, apparently, you really can’t wait.