JetBlue Las Vegas Pilot Suspended After In-Flight Tirade (VIDEO)
The JetBlue pilot who has captured headlines for his mid-air rant on a flight from New York to Las Vegas on Tuesday has been suspended from his pilot duties by the popular airline company.
JetBlue pilot Clayton Osbon, 49, has been in the hospital since Tuesday's incident on JetBlue Flight 191 and the company announced on Wednesday that Osbon's pilot duties would be suspended pending further investigation.
"As of now, he's been taken off all active duties and responsibilities pending further investigation," JetBlue spokeswoman Tamara Young told ABC News.
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Dave Barger, JetBlue CEO and President, spoke on the "TODAY" show Wednesday morning to express his shock at Tuesday's incident.
"Obviously, the captain's now in the hands of medical care, obviously under the custody of the FBI," Barger said.
"I've known the captain personally for a long period of time, and there's been no indication of this at all in the past," Barger added, before calling his friend a "consummate professional."
Osbon's landlady from an apartment that the pilot rents in the Queens borough of New York City has also expressed shock over the JetBlue Las Vegas flight incident, telling the local ABC news station that Osbon was a "great guy."
"No problem you would think, none," she added.
Osbon, a veteran pilot who has been flying with the company for 12 years and part of JetBlue's pilot training program, started behaving irrationally on the Tuesday flight from New York's JFK International Airport to Las Vegas when the flight was thousands of feet in the air.
"They're going to take us down! They're going to take us down! Say the Lord's Prayer, say the Lord's Prayer," Osbon screamed through the aisles of the aircraft after the co-pilot locked him out of the cockpit following a display of erratic behavior.
"He started banging on the door, kicking on the door, trying to get inside the cockpit. He actually started yelling, 'It's going to blow up,'" one passenger told ABC News.
"Iraq, al-Qaida, terrorism, we're all going down," the pilot shouted before passengers contained the 6-foot-4, 250-pound pilot by sitting on him while the flight made an emergency landing in Texas.
It is unclear what caused Osbon to go off, but his wife of several years has said that he did not display any unusual behavior prior to the incident.
Osbon remains in a hospital in Amarillo, Texas, and is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation.
A video of Osborn being tackled by passengers can be seen below:
