COME WITH US: A passenger identified as former New Yorker Marcus Covington is taken off a JetBlue flight Sunday night in Denver. (Yoram Kohanzadeh)
At least this time, it wasn’t the pilot.
A New York-to-Los Angeles JetBlue flight made an emergency landing in Denver after a drunken, freaked-out passenger groped a pregnant woman and threatened crew members and his fellow fliers, authorities said yesterday.
Marcus Covington, 32, who said he used to live on the Lower East Side and in Queens, was arraigned in Denver federal court on a charge of interfering with a flight crew, which carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence.
At one point, Covington allegedly approached a 27-year-old pregnant woman and ran his hands over her body.
Covington was calmed during his alleghed freakout Sunday evening by movie producer Cassian Elwes.
When Elwes boarded Flight 677 at Kennedy Airport, he found Covington in his assigned seat — and right away, he knew something was off about him.
“Hey that’s my seat man I said,” Elwes tweeted.
“A quick drawling f–k you its mine now was the response. I sat down next to him mumbling ‘charming.’ ”
Elwes said Covington, now of Chicago, was drunk and taking meds for bipolar disorder.
During the flight, Covington got up and walked up to fellow passengers “saying things to them that did not make sense,” according to an FBI affidavit filed in Denver federal court.
Elwes and FBI agent Scott Garriola, a passenger on the plane, tried to calm Covington when he returned to his seat.
Elwes tweeted that when he began chatting him up, Covington replied, “I’m a f–king marine man don’t f–k with me . . . I will kill you man.”
But Elwes managed to keep Covington talking enough to quell the situation, speaking about tattoos. “He shows me the one of his arm with the madonna [and said] I shot heroin in her eyes.”
Elwes said he later saw Covington bound with a Hannibal Lecter-style mask over his face. Police said Covington spat at them and threatened to kill them.
It was the second JetBlue flight interrupted this year by an in-flight meltdown. The first time, it was a pilot’s. In March, a Kennedy-to-Las Vegas JetBlue flight made an emergency landing in Texas after its captain freaked out and the co-pilot locked him out of the cockpit.