2 Passengers and a Dog Slid Off a Moving Plane at New York’s LaGuardia Airport

As Delta flight 462 was preparing for departure from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport on Monday, a man, woman, and dog exited the plane via the emergency slide during taxiing, The New York Times reported. 

The Atlanta-bound flight, which was scheduled to depart at 9:50 a.m. local time, ended up leaving at 7:17 p.m. from gate D10, according to FlightStats. 

An eyewitness on the flight told the newspaper that the two passengers kept changing seats on the plane, which wasn’t full. Although a flight attendant did try to get them to sit down, they never did, and the man said that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, stating that if he sat down, he’d “freak out,” according to the fellow passenger.

While the plane was taxiing, it suddenly came to a halt — and the crew explained what had happened: The man had opened a cabin door and deployed the emergency slide, deplaning with the woman and service dog, The New York Times reported. The two passengers were taken into custody. 

“This doesn’t happen every day,” Lenis Valens, a spokesperson for Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, told The New York Times. 

A Delta spokesperson told the news outlet that the plane returned to the gate and passengers were placed on alternative flights. 

These two weren’t the first to make a quick exit via the emergency slide. In 2016, a United flight attendant deployed the slide after a flight arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, while a teen made a quick exit from a Copa Airlines flight landing at San Francisco International Airport from Panama City in 2017. Similarly, in 2018, a passenger claiming he was on the wrong flight left on the slide while the plane was parked at the gate at Newark Liberty International Airport, and 32 passengers slid out on the slide after a misunderstanding when an Aer Lingus flight made an emergency landing in Cork, Ireland.