- RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8 Winner Jimbo was seen on news videos evacuating from a plane.
- A United Airlines representative says Entertainment Weekly The flight was diverted due to a “possible security issue.”
- Several media outlets reported that passengers on board feared there was a bomb on the plane.
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8 winner jimbo was evacuated from a plane amid a bomb threat, as the drag superstar’s United Airlines flight from Chicago to New York City was diverted to Pittsburgh due to a “possible security issue,” an airline official told him. Entertainment Weekly in a statement.
“It was so scary!” Jimbo exclusively tells EW after the incident, which he previously updated fans about through her. Instagram Storywhere she called the ordeal “really scary” and thanked fans for “all the messages and all the love” afterwards.
A United Airlines flight from Chicago to New York City “landed in Pittsburgh” on Saturday to “address a potential safety issue” and “passengers safely evacuated the plane using slides,” a United spokesperson told EW in a statement.
The statement goes on to add that “passengers boarded a different plane to New York” around 4:24 p.m. local time, with no injuries reported among the 159 passengers and six crew members on board.
Jimbo tells EW that passengers were initially asked to disembark before the plane took off from Chicago, but were eventually allowed to return to the flight.
“Randomly, all of a sudden, the pilot said, ‘Okay, when we order you to prepare, everyone needs to prepare. Practice your support position right now,'” he said. Canada’s Endurance Race remember the alum. “We all start to prepare, I start to pray.”
When the flight finally landed on its diverted stop in Pennsylvania, “everyone cheered because everyone thought we were dying,” Jimbo recalls.
“As soon as people clapped for five seconds, they were like, ‘Run, run, run, go, go, go!’ Then everyone starts running for the exits,” Jimbo recalls. “I literally run onto the wing,” he continues, adding that passengers “just had to jump onto the wing. They were like, ‘Run,’ and I’m like, ‘Where the fuck am I running to?'”
Jimbo remembers that “everyone was screaming” and finally says that he had to slide down a wing to get to the ground.
In news coverage of the incident (below), Jimbo can be seen rushing to abandon the plane, sliding down the wing and running across a field to safety.
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ABC News reported that the pilots heard “sequential beeps” on board, and the FBI’s Pittsburgh division issued a statement to local news channel WTAE indicating that anti-explosion technicians were at the scene investigating.
The Allegheny County Police Bomb Squad told the station that its EOD and K9 units conducted a sweep of the “plane, passengers and luggage with negative results,” according to WTAE.