MIAMI - Just the sight of the nervous, unshaven man with a ponytail waiting alone to board their airplane made some of the other passengers jittery.
Sickly pale and missing some teeth, he grinned to himself wildly. And he gave off a smell that made more than a few people turn their heads.
''He was really crazy,'' said Amandine Mallen, 23, a Parisian who boarded American Airlines Flight 63 for Miami early Saturday. ''I saw him boarding at the gate. He was smiling really strangely.''
Arlette Debry of Paris told her husband that the man looked suspicious, the way she supposed a terrorist might. But once the flight took off about 5:30 a.m., after a late start, they forgot their worries.
It would be a fateful flight. The vigilance of the passengers - their suspicions piqued in the departure lounge, their instincts honed by post-Sept. 11 worries - would help prevent another terror attack. In recounting the tale, they made it clear that in today's frenzied skies, passengers must be prepared to take action. And they expressed pride at a job well done.
''This bastard had no chance,'' said Jacques Valle'au, who lives in Paris.
At first, things seemed normal aboard the Boeing 767 for the 14 crew members and 183 passengers, who propped pillows behind them and opened novels as they settled in for the trans-Atlantic flight. Many were headed for a vacation in the Caribbean or South America, via Miami.
About an hour into the flight, the crew served lunch. An Arabic-speaking flight attendant would later tell a passenger that the man, sitting in Row 29 on the plane's right side behind the wing, spoke to her in Arabic as he refused a meal and drinks. Most people were finishing lunch when passengers near the back of the cabin smelled something burning. The odor - perhaps matches or plastic - seemed to be coming from the man's seat.
''I thought, `OK, someone is trying to have a puff on a ciggy because, you know, there are a lot of French people there,''' said Philippe Acas of St. Quentin Enyvelines, France.
Another passenger pointed to the man in Row 29 as flight attendant Hermis Moutardier scanned the aisle for the person with matches, authorities said. When she confronted the man, he put the lit match into his mouth. Moutardier left to alert the captain over the intercom system.
When she returned, the man appeared to be lighting another match and trying to set fire to the tongue of his sneaker, which passengers described as a black suede high-top basketball shoe.
Moutardier spotted a wire sticking out of the sneaker, authorities said, and she grabbed for the shoe. The man then shoved her against a bulkhead. She tried again for the shoe, and he pushed her to the floor, investigators said.
She got up, yelled for help and ran for water. A second flight attendant, Cristina Jones, joined the struggle. Suddenly, passengers heard her cry out, ''He bit me!''
Passengers rushed to join the fray. From about 10 rows back, Thierry Dugeon leaped out of his seat and rushed toward the passenger. What he confronted was a man at least 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighing more than 200 pounds. ''I was there in five seconds, and there were already two or three guys on him,'' said Dugeon, 36, a former television newsman from Paris.
Meanwhile, Eric Debry, who was flying with his wife and children, ages 13 and 9, was sitting in Row 30. He had eaten lunch and fallen asleep when he awoke to a smoky odor and commotion. Debry reached over the seat, grabbed the man by the shoulders and yanked his arms back. ''I jumped on his shoulder. Two other guys came and took his legs,'' Debry said. ''Even after I took his hand he was still trying to reach down and light his shoe.''
Flight attendants in the front of the plane called out for more help. ''We need some big guys back there real quick,'' a flight attendant told Kwame James, a 6-foot-8 professional basketball player in Europe. James bounded down the aisle toward the struggle near the middle of the plane.
''He was just unbelievably strong, almost possessed,'' James recalled yesterday morning on ABC's This Week show.
For about 10 minutes, at least five male passengers struggled to subdue the man and wrest the matches from his hand.
At that point, some said, he declared that he was ''wired.''
A crew member threatened the man with a fire extinguisher and several passengers doused him with water, fearing that something might be smoldering, Debry said. Though he was kicking, the flight attendants finally managed to wrench the shoes from his feet.
The crew looked around for something with which to restrain him. As male passengers held him down, others rounded up about 20 leather belts from passengers and used them to bind his hands, waist, chest and feet and strap him to his seat. ''We had big muscles on this plane,'' said Valle'au, who works in the fashion industry. ''These guys were giants. Big muscles. He wasn't going too far.''
With the man finally subdued, the crew and some passengers searched him and found a British passport identifying him as Richard C. Reid. Authorities were having a hard time pinning down his identity yesterday. French authorities called him Sri Lankan and some said he had other aliases, including Tariq Raja, a Sri Lankan national.
Acas, 39, who lives near Versailles and was on his way to Club Med in the Bahamas, said passengers also found two audiotapes in Reid's possession and turned them over to the pilot. Flight attendants asked whether he spoke French, English, or Arabic. He said he was Jamaican, Dugeon said.
A few minutes later the crew found two French doctors and asked for help keeping the man under control. They injected him with a sedative from the onboard medical kit. And passengers seated near Row 29 moved to other seats on the plane. For the next three hours or so, passengers took turns keeping watch over the sedated Reid, with at least one person holding his ponytail from behind. Soon, the pilot announced the plane would make an unscheduled stop in Boston. Many passengers who hadn't gotten a close view of the struggle said they assumed the man was simply a belligerent drunk who had to be subdued.
But soon, they saw two F-15 fighters flying alongside the plane.
The flight crew put on the movie ''Legally Blonde,'' and some passengers even chuckled at the comedy. But others suspiciously glanced around the cabin, wondering if their fellow passengers were accomplices. ''I was so scared he had a brother or somebody else on the plane,'' Dugeon said.
When the plane landed at Logan at about 12:50 p.m. Saturday, a SWAT team stormed onboard and took the man into custody.
Geoffrey Bessin, 31, of Toulouse, France, a software designer, had been sitting in business class and hadn't seen the scuffle, but vaguely knew something had happened. While the plane sat on the ground in Boston, Bessin's cellphone rang. It was a friend calling to see if he was all right. The friend had heard reports of a possible terrorist onboard. ''He had a bomb in his shoe,'' his friend told him.
''He had what in his shoe?'' Bessin said. ''I couldn't believe it.''
Passengers were cleared by Customs officials and told to wait at Terminal B to be interviewed by FBI agents. A Massport spokeswoman could not say for sure that the passengers were secured in the area at that time, but she said they were all accounted for before most of them boarded another plane at about 1 a.m.
The plane made another stop at JFK International Airport in New York, where some passengers got off. The rest of the flight to Miami was subdued. Many passengers had been up for more than 24 hours, and several would have to catch other planes.
At the end of the flight, at nearly 6 a.m. yesterday, an unidentified man stood up and read a prepared speech commending the crew and passengers for banding together. He said, ''God bless us that we are all still alive.''
Valle'au translated the speech into French.
Safely on the ground at Miami International Airport, Gabriel Bolanos, 17, of Brussels, said he was grateful that other passengers knew what to do and helped get him safely to Miami - a stopover on his way to Nicaragua. ''I was pretty scared at the time,'' the teen said. ''Really scared, I guess. Now I'm just relieved that nothing serious happened to us.''
By Michael Rosenwald, Globe Staff and Michele Kurtz Globe Correspondent, 12/24/2001. Marcella Bombardieri and Robert Schlesinger of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press was also used.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on
12/24/2001.