Flight attendant's story doubted

AP

DOUBTS RAISED: Passenger accounts conflict with those of folk hero flight attendant Steven Slater.

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Serious doubts have been raised about the story of the US flight attendant who left a plane in spectacular fashion.

Steven Slater said he had his now famous meltdown after a passenger's baggage hit his head just after the domestic flight he was working on landed in New York.

But some passengers said he already had a gash at the start of the flight.

"When I got on the flight, he was sitting near the exit row. ... He already had a cut on his head and it was bleeding," Lauren Wood told the New York Post.

"And, he just said, 'You won't believe the day that I had,' and that was right at the beginning of the flight when I boarded."

Others said he was rude and instigated the confrontation that he ended by barrelling down an emergency slide at New York's Kennedy Airport.

Marjorie Briskin, 53, told The Wall Street Journal Mr Slater blurted out an expletive during an otherwise normal conversation with a passenger over luggage.

"I didn't think she was rude in the least," Ms Briskin, a schoolteacher, told the Journal.

"It really blew my mind. It was so inappropriate."

Another woman, 25-year-old Lauren Dominijanni, told the Journal Slater was immediately rude to her. She said Slater "rolled his eyes at me" when she asked for a wipe to clean up coffee someone spilled on her seat.

When she pointed to the coffee, Slater yelled: "No! Maybe when we get in the air! I need to take care of myself first, honey!"

He was pointing to a gash on his head at that point, she said. Mr Slater did not return with the wipes, and spent the flight slamming doors and bins on the flight instead.

"It wasn't normal and he shouldn't have been acting that way. I felt so uncomfortable on that flight."

But the ex-wife of Mr Slater, Cynthia Susanne, told US TV network ABC's Good Morning America she did not believe the passengers' suggestions that he started the confrontation.

She said Slater was extraordinarily tolerant and patient.

Ms Susanne said she had not spoken to him since the confrontation on the Pittsburgh-to-New York flight.

But she said he probably was as baffled as she about the attention his actions were getting.

The couple have a son together.

Slater is charged with criminal mischief and reckless endangerment for deploying an emergency exit chute.

- © Fairfax NZ News