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’m not defending the pilot but the plane had reached its destination and needed to land.
They can’t land the plane if someone is in the bathroom.
Article was corrected to 20 minutes.
@JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
Edit: never mind, context was added between 20 and 10 minutes, but that context is informative about their interaction.
I feel like it’s pretty clear from reading the interaction what did and didn’t happen.
About 10 minutes later, with Liebb still indisposed, the pilot approached Sebbag and asked him to check on Liebb, the lawsuit says.
Happened.
The pilot then yelled at Liebb to leave the bathroom immediately, the lawsuit says.
Happened.
Liebb said he told the pilot that he was finishing up and would be out momentarily.
Could go either way. It is starting to fall into a recognizable pattern, though, of “everything he did was crazy and unhinged, literally everything on my side was totally calm and reasonable” that usually is not how confrontations happen.
The pilot became visibly enraged, broke the lock on the door and forced the door to the bathroom open
Definitely didn’t happen.
making scathing remarks about their Judaism, and how ‘Jews act’
Definitely didn’t happen.
Liebb said when he asked why they were being detained, an officer tightened his handcuffs and responded: “This isn’t county or state. We are homeland. You have no rights here.”
Probably happened. 😦
Oh yea, dont debate any of that. I wasn’t saying this wasn’t a 100% show of feces.
30 minutes? You need to know when to give up buddy. It’s especially fucking rude on an airplane where there are lots of people and limited bathrooms. And security concerns…
That said, when you open the door and you see the dude is actually sitting on the can with his pants down - and not up to something nefarious - maybe you don’t drag him out?
Then we have the cops, need I say more?
Jeez, assholes all around.
Much more detailed article here: https://aviationa2z.com/index.php/2025/03/22/united-pilot-abuse-jewish-passenger-using-lavatory/
There should be a timer and if you take too long the “sonic running out of air” music should start playing.
Now there’s a comment I can hear!
Do you die if you don’t leave the toilet before the music stops? Is your seat your last save checkpoint, or do you respawn right back at the airport?
The main lights shut off until the door is opened, and a display with the word ‘altitude’ starts counting down
Lol
Why was the pilot involved? Shouldn’t be be in the secured cockpit?
The rules are that they can’t take off or land unless everyone is properly seated.
The pooper was forcing the entire plane to remain in the air.
Many years ago I was on a plane that hadn’t taken off yet, and someone was in the bathroom. They couldn’t taxi until the person returned to their seat, and after several announcements, flight attendants wind up having to knock on the door so the person (who I assume at that point was hiding due to embarrassment) would return to their seat. We missed our takeoff window with ground control and had to wait an additional half hour to find another window. All of my flights connecting flights were delayed until it could land, but a severe storm blew through, grounding most of them for about an hour more.
In the world of flying, these sorts of small delays have unintended consequences with system-wide effects.But the pilot featured here was beyond the pale. That was a grotesque and inappropriate response.
I wonder if they were in the air or on the ground. Based on the fact that they were detained after they landed I’m guessing they were in the air. The whole thing sounds very non-ideal. Reading through the discovery material, if the case makes it that far, will be interesting.
the co-pilot probably took over.
Airplanes have two pilots (edit:
and most commonly, the less senior one is the one physically flying the planeI am wrong). It does happen that one or the other of them will leave the cockpit to deal with something in an emergency (which this is, since they can’t land the plane until it is dealt with). Presumably the captain is the one that dealt with Mr. Poosticks.We just swap who flies each leg, I’ll do one, the other pilot will do the next, and so on. Seniority really doesn’t play into it at all. Usually we don’t leave the flight deck to deal with emergencies, we rely on the cabin crew for that.
We just swap who flies each leg
I need more coffee…
“Ok this time I’ll control the left side, you do the right!”
Oh, TIL. Somehow I thought it was usually the more senior person was monitoring and less senior person was flying, but I guess that is not the case.
Officers proceeded directly to Liebb and his companion, removed them from their seats, and placed them in handcuffs.
Why was the companion placed in handcuffs? There is no indication from any source I’ve seen that explains why.
Accessory to second-degree constipation.
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
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.
unless he had pretty bad food poisoning, theres no reason to be in there.
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.
30 minutes is a hell of a long time to be in the bathroom.
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?
Have you tried adding more fiber to your diet?
Classic victim blaming.
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.
Liebb said when he asked why they were being detained, an officer tightened his handcuffs and responded: “This isn’t county or state. We are homeland. You have no rights here.”
I love seeing what people think they can get away with in lawsuits like this. “I was being perfectly reasonable, and taking a 30 minute poop in quiet bliss, when the Defendant STORMED down the plane and VIOLENTLY DEMANDED I exit the lavatory. I calmly and eloquently explained my gastrointestinal predicament before the Pilot SMASHED THE DOOR IN WITH HIS FACE AND YELLED RACIST REMARKS AT ME WHILE DRAGGING ME AND MY FRIEND DOWN THE AISLE BY THE HAIR.”
Okay, this isn’t about the BS arrest, but if you are taking 30+ minutes to unsuccessfully take a shit:
Get yourself a Fleet enema, it will make you shit like a horse in 10 minutes, guaranteed. You can find them in drugstores and it will leave you clean.
Two, you really should be eating at least 30g of chia seeds a day, they are high in fiber and will help avoid bowel-distending events before they start. Put them in a smoothie or on yogurt. Or take metamucil if you can stand the taste.
Three, you should talk to your doctor about distended bowels and profound constipation. If you aren’t taking a shit for a few days to a week, you might be damaging your colon, which is bad on many levels.
Tough to do most of that if the severity of it only became clear recently.
It does seem like after 10 minutes or something that you give up and try again later, though. But I don’t know what state he was in exactly so not sure if that seemed practical either.
A passenger simply complained about the dude “blowing up” the bathroom. SMH
