Because that's who was trying to kick out a window.
That incident was a case of a kid throwing a tantrum. A choke hold is not the proper response to that. IMO, duck taping the little shit to the seat is a very appropriate response if the child is truly uncontrollable.
What about this being a 13 year old is mitigating in your mind vs a middle-aged person?
If the latter, sorry I misunderstood what you were addressing.
But otherwise this isn’t a punitive thing where we’re measuring how wrong they are and their mental ability / level of guilt before acting. It’s a temporary and immediate solution when the parent can’t handle it on their own and the staff talking to them isn’t mitigating the risk.
The idea is to choose the safest and least violent viable option until law enforcement can handle it (choking someone… eh not so much).
Absent ‘alternative means’ provided by the airline, duct tape is one of the quickest, most widely accessible, and probably most practical if non-violent options all fail. Not everyone carries rope or other restraints. These are civilian airline workers too.
Restraining someone can have a legitimate mental impact and bad PR but so does the rest of the passengers who are all naturally scared of plane crashes.
The door will not open. The window itself is strong enough to withstand any kick that someone could put on it, but that is largely irrelevant as there is the a scratch pane, and that additional window with the tiny hole in the bottom in front of it for additional protection.
If you're holding a choke hold beyond the point someone has passed out, i.e. "risking killing them", then YOU are the danger to others in that situation, not mentally ill dude trying in futility to exit the aircraft at 36000ft.
Im also not sure what to make of your comments regarding windows and doors on airplanes. It seems the doors would be impossible to open at high enough altitude, but I’m not so sure about windows:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2243764/Man-arreste...
I wonder if in this example it was just the interior layer of plastic/glass?
It's possible, though unlikely, the guy in the article made it through the middle plexiglass layer in addition to the inner layer which is only there to stop you from scratching the plexiglass; at 4mm thick it's certainly within the realm of human strength. However at 12mm the outer layer is comfortably beyond what a human could crack without weapons/tools.
I'm mostly curious about whether there's a real risk or not of a passenger breaking a window without tools.
This seems like one of those situations where we don't want to just assume that what we think the window can handle is the same as what it can actually handle.
I expect airline windows to be able to withstand the kick of a child. Even if they were an older child.
I don’t think you can reasonably expect people to sit there and do nothing in a situation where a 13 year old boy is overpowering his mother and kicking airplane windows.
Like I’m definitely not sitting there going “oh well I guess since we couldn’t hold them down well just have to hope the window doesn’t break”.
It was still a child. The airplane windows should hold. Restraints are fine, if you really need them. Duct tape, though?
It was still a child. Even at 13.
Right? If someone attempts to cause structural damage at 30k feet, I'm going to stop that person with any means necessary.