Thank you, big people

I know we Americans don’t agree on much these days, but
I’ll bet we agree that about the last thing you want to
see on your Jet Blue flight from New York to Las Vegas is
somebody screaming about a bomb and banging on the cockpit
door. Especially if it’s the pilot.

“Within a short period of time he started screaming
about al Qaeda and possibly a bomb on the plane, and Iraq
and Iran, and we’re all going down,” reported one
passenger.

And when that kind of thing happens, and there are no sky
marshals on board, I think we can also all agree that it
would be great if your plane was full of people on their
way to Las Vegas to attend an International Security
Conference.

“By a stroke of good luck we happened to have a former
NYPD officer onboard. We had a former corrections officer
onboard,” said Laurie Dhue, a former anchor for Fox and
CNN who also happened to be on board.

And while nobody’s quite sure what set off pilot
Clayton Osbon, everybody saw who took him down – it was
former Corrections Officer Dave Gonzalez, a very big man.

“I wasn’t letting go of this guy until we landed the
plane. I was still on top of this guy until we landed the
plane,” said Gonzalez.

So Dave held him down, various other big people used
their belts to secure his hands. An off-duty pilot who
also happened to be aboard helped land the plane, and
everybody else, of course, took out their cell phones and
started taping.

I have to say, I know we have all those drones, and
that gigantic defense department keeping us safe, but if
we just gave free plane tickets to big people like Dave
Gonzales, al Qaeda would have to give up.

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