Metro

Family flies to the defense of plane-iac

That’s my boy!

Airhead flight attendant Steven Slater’s proud mom yesterday said her son did exactly what she taught him to do — stand up for himself — when he went berserk on a rude passenger at JFK and launched the plane’s emergency chute to escape Monday.

“Nobody should be abusing anybody, and I understand why he snapped,” said 75-year-old, tough-as-nails Diane Slater, from her home in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

“I would have snapped, too,” insisted the mother, a former flight attendant now battling lung cancer. “In fact, I probably would have snapped more.”

Steven Slater’s ex-wife, Cynthia Susanne Neithamer, told The Post that her former spouse “has been a fantastic and devoted flight attendant.

“I’m just really surprised [at what he did] because he really loves his job,” Neithamer, 38, said outside her Branson, Mo., home.

Neithamer’s grandfather, Harry, 82, said the incident was clearly the passenger’s fault.

“That passenger must a bitch, just a pure bitch, because nobody else could get him wound up like that,” the granddad told The Post.

“He’s just a straight person,” he said of Slater. “When I first heard about it, I thought they had the wrong name, until I saw the picture of Stevie.”

The elderly man said his granddaughter has a child by Slater — a boy now in his teens — and that the flight attendant is a devoted dad.

“He always wanted to be an airline steward, even when he was still going to high school,” Harry Neithamer said.

Noting that Slater’s late father was an American Airlines pilot and his mom a stewardess, he added, “It was in his blood.”

Additional reporting by Matthew Kent in Branson