Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recounted an unusual incident from a previous Air Force One flight. During a recent appearance, Rubio explained that an unidentified passenger appeared completely unresponsive despite the activity around them, leaving him and other officials unsure whether the person was simply asleep or had passed.
Marco Rubio describes the bizarre Air Force One scare involving an unidentified sleeping passenger
Secretary of State Marco Rubio recalled an incident aboard Air Force One when an unidentified passenger appeared to be asleep. Speaking on the Katie Miller Podcast, Rubio said the incident occurred during a flight back to the United States from China.
The passenger was lying on a couch in the aircraft’s conference room. Secretary of State said, “I couldn’t see chest movement. I couldn’t… establish a consistent breathing pattern in the individual. But I also didn’t want to wake them up on the one hand, or discover a dead body on the other.”
Rubio said he and other officials spent about 90 minutes deciding how to respond. “We spent about 90 minutes sort of debating should we make a move? Should I call the doc? Should we deal with this? Because it’s embarrassing if you wake them up. ‘Oh, I was just sleeping.’ But if they were dead, like what do you do? You have a dead body on the plane.”
The passenger continued sleeping despite the activity around them. Rubio said there was “a lot of noise” and that the lights were on, but the individual remained unresponsive. “You could see every now and then that there was like maybe a breath, but I don’t know how you sustain life at that pace of respiration,” he added.
The uncertainty eventually ended when the passenger woke up roughly 90 minutes later. Rubio said the person was fine, but he did not reveal their identity.
