Teamwork on Jet Averted Calamity

If a strapping Italian with a fighter’s physique hadn’t been in Row 30, then American Airlines Flight 63, the plane boarded by the alleged shoe bomber, might have terminated in explosive tragedy, a passenger said Thursday.

“We’re lucky he wasn’t in front of an old lady,” Frenchman Philippe Acas said. “He was sitting in front of an Italian boxer, who really took care of him.”

Richard C. Reid, 28, is being held on federal charges in Boston after reportedly trying to set off a bomb in his shoe. The Paris-to-Miami flight was diverted there Saturday after flight attendants and passengers managed to overpower the 6-foot-4 Reid.

It could have ended very differently, said Acas, 39, who manages the French operations of a U.S. company that manufactures multimedia projectors.

Many of the 185 passengers aboard the Boeing 767 didn’t even know an apparent terrorist act had been thwarted, he said.

“I would say people mostly didn’t realize what was happening,” Acas said by telephone from the Club Med resort where he is now vacationing on Paradise Island, Bahamas. “So of course there was confusion. People standing up and watching. Most people just stood still. You can’t see much in a plane anyway.”

After lunch over the Atlantic, some passengers smelled a strange odor in the cabin. They summoned a flight attendant, who allegedly caught Reid trying to light his sneakers with a match. When the crew member, identified as Hermis Moutardier, tried to stop him, he apparently bit her on the hand.

“I was about three rows behind, so when she was screaming ‘Help me! Help me!’ I realized something was wrong,” Acas said. He instinctively bolted forward and was the fourth person to respond, he said.

The Italian already had grabbed Reid from behind. The man, who didn’t speak English, apparently never talked to reporters, Acas said.

“We had nothing to tie him up, so we asked for belts,” said Acas, who stripped off his own to loop around Reid.

Reid’s arms were bent over the back of his seat and fastened there to prevent him from moving. Two French doctors on the flight gave Reid shots of sedatives from the plane’s medical kit. Acas said it took half an hour before the drugs took effect. Luckily, he said, the fight seemed to have been knocked out of him.

“If he had been in a very nervous state, he would have been much more difficult to handle,” said Acas, who lives in St. Quentin en Yvelines in the Paris suburbs.

The whole episode, from the scent of burning sulfur to the restraint of Reid, may have lasted only 10 or 20 minutes, Acas said. The crew then turned on the in-flight movie and the pilot announced the flight was being diverted to Boston’s Logan International Airport. Two passengers, meanwhile, kept a wary watch on Reid, one in the aisle seat beside him, the other directly behind him, holding him by his long hair.

Kwame James, a 6-foot-8 professional basketball player, also helped overpower Reid. He told ABC’s “This Week” that he and two other men held the man down for 10 minutes while others used leather belts, seat belts and earphone cords to restrain him.

“He was unbelievably strong,” James said. “We just pretty much held him from his shoulders and his upper body so he couldn’t make any rapid movements.”

Some passengers on Flight 63 landed in Boston still unaware that a tragedy might have been prevented and thought the restrained man was a drunk or drug addict who became unruly.

“I’d say there was no atmosphere of crisis, no crying,” Acas said. “Things were pretty quiet.”