An Alaska Airlines flight bound for Seattle was placed into a cockpit lockdown at Miami International Airport (MIA) on Sunday evening after pilots reported that a passenger had threatened to “take over” the aircraft moments after it pushed back from the gate.
The aircraft, operating as flight AS-305, was a Boeing 737 preparing for the roughly six-hour transcontinental service to Seattle. According to a recording of communications between the cockpit and the airport tower obtained by Enhanced Radar, the crew had only just been released from the pushback tug and were beginning to taxi when they abruptly stopped and set the parking brake.
“Ramp, Alaska 305, we have set the parking brake and we have a customer disturbance on board right now, with threats coming from customers. We want to go into a lockdown protocol. We are shutting down the engine, and parking brake set,” one of the pilots told the tower.
In a follow-up transmission, the pilot added that the cabin crew had been threatened directly: “The flight attendants have received threats from customers on board the aircraft… the last thing we heard from the flight attendant is that we had a customer threat to take the aircraft over.”
Because the pushback tug had already been disconnected, the aircraft — still close to gate E6 — could not immediately return to the stand. The pilots worked to reconnect with ground staff so the tug could be reattached and the jet towed back to the gate. Alaska Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Flight-tracking data from Flightradar24 showed the departure pushed back to 8:48 p.m. at the earliest.
When crews deal with disruptive travelers, airlines apply an internationally recognized four-level matrix to classify the threat. Level 1 covers disruptive behavior such as refusing lawful crew instructions; Level 2 involves physical contact such as shoving or punching; Level 3 describes life-threatening behavior, including the use or threat of a weapon; and Level 4 — the most serious — is any attempt to breach the flight deck, which triggers hijack protocols.
Whenever the integrity of the cockpit is threatened, pilots initiate a lockdown in which the reinforced flight-deck door stays sealed until the danger has passed, with any communication to the cabin handled through the interphone system. That procedure is precisely what the AS-305 crew invoked before shutting down an engine and holding position on the ramp.
Unruly-passenger events remain a persistent challenge for U.S. carriers. The Federal Aviation Administration has logged 1,014 unruly passenger reports in 2026 so far. While that figure sits well below the pandemic-era peak recorded in 2021, incidents involving threats to the crew or the aircraft continue to draw scrutiny because of how quickly they can escalate.
For Alaska, the episode ended without injury and with a delay rather than a diversion, but it underscored how seriously flight crews treat any suggestion of a threat to the cockpit. By pausing on the ramp and locking down before takeoff, the pilots kept a volatile situation on the ground rather than in the air.
Sources: PYOK. Featured image: AI-generated by AviationShop. By Marco Bianchi.
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