WASHINGTON - Passengers aboard a United States flight grabbed and subdued a man who tried to open an emergency exit midair, forcing the American Airlines plane to return shortly after take-off.

Video of the Feb 20 afternoon altercation, shared widely on social media and television, showed passengers yanking the man’s hands off of the mid-plane exit door and then multiple people lying on top of him in the aisle.

The Chicago-bound plane, which took off from the south-western city of Albuquerque, made it above about 8km before turning around to land, according to tracking data.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said “American Airlines Flight 1219 returned safely” to Albuquerque “after the crew reported a passenger disturbance”.

American Airlines said in a statement that following an incident “involving a disruptive customer”, the aircraft “was met by local law enforcement” upon landing.

Mr Blaze Ward, one of the passengers who intervened, told local station ABC-7 that the man “already had the safety mechanism down and had both hands on the lever”.

“He was yanking it and he was a big dude, and he had it pretty well pulled. And I don’t know if you can hear it, but there was a difference in pressure, a whistling,” he said.

Despite more than a decade without a fatal passenger plane accident in the United States, scrutiny of the industry has been heightened since an in-flight incident in January, when a panel blew off of an Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737-Max 9.

The number of unruly passengers has also soared in recent years, with more than 2,000 incidents in both 2022 and 2023, according to FAA statistics.

However, those figures are down markedly from a record high of nearly 6,000 in 2021. AFP