A California man may get up to 20 years in prison if he is convicted for assaulting and choking the attendants on a Frontier Airlines flight from Santa Ana to San Francisco.
Fremont resident Charles Angel Salva, 30, had his first court appearance on September 12. He is accused of bizarre and violent behavior during what should have been a very short flight.
As the plane climbed out of the airport, flight attendants noticed that oxygen masks had been deployed over one of the seat rows, which is not supposed to happen below 10,000 feet. That is the ceiling at which most people can breathe comfortably; oxygen masks only deploy above 10,000 feet and only if the cabin depressurizes.
When the crew took a closer look, they said Salva had opened the overhead compartment containing the equipment. A nearby passenger told the flight attendants that Salva seemed claustrophobic and like he wanted to get off the plane. The passenger said Salva pulled the mask down but then found his hand stuck in the compartment. It was at that point that he started screaming that “this airplane is going down,” and that “we are all going to hell.”
Salva tried to grab a hold of other passengers but a flight attendant held him back. Reports claim that he got up and ran to the back of plane, grabbed a lanyard around another flight attendant’s neck and started to choke her while saying “I’m going to choke this b*tch.” Salva reportedly shoved another crew member hard and threatened to kill everyone on the plane according to federal prosecutors.
Passengers tried to lend a hand to restrain Salva as he was kicking a flight attendant in the legs. Meanwhile the pilots called in the emergency to air traffic control and altered the plane’s course to make for nearby Ontario International Airport (located in California, not Canada).
On landing police boarded the plane, restrained Salva, and wheeled him off on a gurney. He was taken to a local hospital.
The story gets even stranger and suggests Salva may have been experiencing an extended break from reality. A passenger claimed to have been traveling to San Francisco with Salva and his toddler daughter after the group visited Disneyland. During the Disneyland trip, the passenger said, Salva abandoned his daughter with other members of the group. The passenger later got a phone call from police stating that Salva had been found at a liquor store covered with raw sewage.
