Mom’s terror as plane passenger tries to open door midair: ‘Start praying!’

A distraught mom says she thought her family was going to die when an apparently drunk, deranged plane passenger tried to open an aircraft door partway through a flight from Cyprus to the United Kingdom.

The “terrifying” midair drama took place on board a Tui Airways flight on Tuesday, about halfway into the five-hour journey.

“He [the combatant passenger] was trying the emergency exit doors to try and get out of the plane,” Melissa Brown, 32, told Kennedy News. “Everybody started screaming and shouting, ‘Help, we’re going to die!’ It was like he wanted to kill us all; it was absolutely terrifying.”

Brown — who had been on vacation in Paphos, Cyprus, with her partner and two kids — was traveling back home to Manchester, England, when she noticed an “aggressive” man on board the plane who was constantly walking up and down the aisles and disappearing into the bathroom.

“He was being disruptive and making people quite agitated and scared,” Brown stated. “My daughter was getting really worked up and upset because we could tell he was intoxicated, definitely as he was swaying and stuff like that.”

The mom claimed a flight attendant approached her and told her that they were “having difficulty” with the man and that he had been making threats to them.

“All of a sudden, he just jumped up in the middle of the plane near the emergency exit and started making hand signals to everybody, praying really loudly in a different language,” Brown then claimed.

“In English, he was saying stuff like, ‘Everybody needs to start praying. I’ll see you all in heaven,’” she recalled.

Brown said other passengers started screaming, grabbing their children and running toward the back of the aircraft.

Meanwhile, a group of male travelers tried to overpower the deranged man, with one punching him in the back of the head and several others subsequently working to restrain him.

Two males, who were off-duty police officers, managed to barricade the man into a seat until the pilot was able to activate an emergency landing.

“The pilot did a really fast descent to a Croatian airport. We were literally falling out of the sky,” Brown stated. “It was really traumatic.”

The name of the man has not been released by Croatian or British media. It is unclear whether police are pressing charges over the aviation emergency.

The Post has reached out to Tui for further information.

In a separate press release, the budget UK airline stated: “The health and safety of our customers and crew is always our highest priority and due to a disruptive passenger the flight was forced to divert to Zagreb, Croatia. The passenger was offloaded, was met by Police will not travel with Tui when the flight departs later today. We take a zero-tolerance approach to disruptive behavior on our flights.”

Brown said she and fellow Tui passengers were stranded at the emptied-out airport after the impromptu late-night landing.

“When we got off the plane we got taken into the airport and just got left there. There was no Tui representatives, the airport was just kind of closed,” Brown complained. “There was no one to help us, so for seven hours all the passengers and children were just sleeping on towels on the cold floor in the airport.”

Several other passengers took to Twitter to moan about the situation, seeming more concerned about their travel delays than they were about the fact a madman had almost ended their lives.

Brown, meanwhile, was grateful that she and her family are safe — but said she has been left traumatized by the ordeal.

“It was terrifying,” she declared. “I think I’ve done all my crying now; I can’t cry anymore.”