Summary
Orthodox Jewish passenger Yisroel Liebb filed a federal lawsuit claiming a United Airlines pilot forcibly removed him from an airplane bathroom during a January 2024 flight from Tulum to Houston, exposing his genitalia to passengers.
Liebb said he was experiencing constipation and had been in the bathroom for about 30 minutes when the pilot broke the lock and dragged him out.
After landing, Customs and Border Protection officers detained Liebb and another passenger, allegedly making derogatory remarks about their religion.
United Airlines and CBP declined to comment.
I just read that and here you’ve posted it. What a fucking nutty situation. Broke the lock? Pulled dude out with his dick out? WTF? And then comments about “teh jewz”? Half a dozen homeland officers to roust them?
Sometimes people piss me off at work too but I do my best to not be racist and abuse them, ya know?
30 minutes is a hell of a long time to be in the bathroom.
I feel like there is a lot of missing context here. Among other things, most of those doors open easily from the outside if you know how. The pilot definitely didn’t break the lock. I wonder if there are other elements of the story that are not true. In particular, I wonder if there was perhaps some amount of conversation that came between “hello sir please I need you to exit the bathroom” “I cannot for I am experiencing a gastrointestinal issue” and the opening of the door. If I had to bet, I would say that’s the first place that there are significant redactions in the supposed story.
If I might speculate, My guess is they needed to land the plane and they cannot do that with him in there.
If say, he went in just as they were making final approach, 30min with him in there is definitely enough they would have to cancel the approach and delay. I can’t say as to if a warning was given or what the circumstances were that led to him getting ya ked out, but something like that definitely can cause issues for pilots needing to get the plane down
Yeah. They can’t land the plane with you in the bathroom, and they can’t keep circling forever burning fuel and delaying however many people from their connecting flights, because you don’t feel like you can be comfortable if you have to not be pooping for the length of time it takes to get back on the ground.
It is a violation of federal law to disobey certain types of instructions from the crew on an airplane for exactly this type of reason. It’s not just a request which is open to negotation depending on what you feel is reasonable and how stubborn you feel like being, because there are physical realities and limitations at play. I think the pilot probably came into the picture because it was a decision of “if someone is going to have to drag this person out of the bathroom physically with his pants down, because that’s the only option he’s leaving us, we would rather it be the highest-ranking person on the plane who takes the responsibility.” Of course this is pure uninformed speculation about what happened. But I have a pretty strong hunch about how it actually went down. I’ve dealt with deeply religious people before sometimes.
Maybe they don’t want to land the plane with someone in the bathroom, but I have a hard time believing they can’t.
Against the law
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/121.311
I’m not a lawyer, but best I can tell from this language, the law is the person operating the plane has to make sure there are seats with restraints, while the people are responsible for using them during takeoff and landing.
I get that for liability reasons, no airline wants to expose themselves by landing without people in their seats. Going further, I interpreted the comment above mine to be saying planes might run out of fuel if the passenger didn’t exit the bathroom. My point was no pilot is going to let the plane crash because someone is in the bathroom.
The link that you were sent is regulations that apply to “certificate holders,” pilots in this case. The requirement that passengers “shall occupy” their seats means that if the plane lands, and the pilot was aware that someone wasn’t in their seat during the landing, the pilot has violated §121.311(b). It’s a big deal. The licensing authorities take things like this super seriously, and a pilot who deliberately violated one of those regulations would at a bare minimum have a black mark on their record that they would have to explain when applying for any future job.
Also, no one is saying the pilot is stupid enough to let the plane crash because someone was in the bathroom. Stop using absurd strawmen and please refrain from it in the future.
Enforcing this law is likely the real function of the flight attendant.
That being said, the PIC is responsible for ensuring there is enough fuel for an alternate airport. But also, if you are below 30 min of fuel, that’s an emergency and you get priority handling.
You might have an excuse if you reached that emergency threshold. Without the ATC recording, it’s hard to determine
The pilot could be fired, and it would definitely impact his license. It would be a permanent alteration to his career. In a physical sense, he could choose to. In a practical sense, fuck no, get back in your seat with your seat belt on.
The reason is that if anything goes wrong on landing, the guy in the bathroom could be injured or killed. The airlines have started fucking around, as far as safety, but the regulations about what pilots are allowed to do were still written back when they did not fuck around.
Discovery will be interesting. I hope that the pilot was on the radio with someone asking for advice/providing updates and doing general CYA things before they physically confronted the passenger. I could easily see the pilot being agitated because they were put in that situation, but I also hope there were other interactions leading up to a rapid escalation.
You don’t have to speculate though. You could look for more information, as another user did, or just agree that it seems over the top and possibly exaggerated. Instead you’re making up scenarios for why an egregious act must have been warranted. And surprise surprise, the actual facts bear no resemblance to what you imagined.
Yeah, it is just one side’s story and it’s the lawsuit so everything is turned to 11. I wonder if we’ll ever see anything about it again.
Unlikely. I’m sure United will settle and give him a payout just to make it go away.
unless he had pretty bad food poisoning, theres no reason to be in there.
Must be nice to be young and healthy.
I’ve been spending more time than that in there since I was a child… Used to bring my comics in there, these days it’s the phone.
Have you tried adding more fiber to your diet?
I don’t have troubles doing the deed, I just like hanging out in there because it’s the one place where no one bothers me and I have no responsibility haha.
Have you tried having an autoimmune disease that affects bowel movements?
Not everybody is healthy and it’s not always their own fault.
I didn’t say it was their fault, I was just offering a suggestion that helped me.
Who pissed in your cheerios?
Classic victim blaming.
I’m sorry you feel that way. Perhaps if you added some fiber to your diet, you might feel better.
A few years ago I would have said there was no fucking way the situation as reported happened. That this side of the story is clearly being hyperbolic and making some stuff up to make it sound worse than it was for the lawsuit.
But given recent events with ICE and CBP… This now seems entirely plausible, which is a ridiculous situation for the country to be in.
An it is United after all. They have a corporate history that definitely lends itself to this being a reasonable story from them.