A domestic flight in the US was forced to make an unscheduled landing after a passenger shouted out that LGBTQ+ people were giving him cancer and that “the plane is going down”.

The Sun Country Airlines plane left Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport at around at 7.15am on Friday (3 October) bound for Newark, New Jersey, but was forced to land in Chicago little more than an hour later – about halfway through the scheduled flight time. 

Speaking to The Minnesota Star Tribune, passenger Seth Evans said the unruly man was sitting across the aisle from him and acted erratically throughout the flight. Between playing games of Candy Crush, the man reportedly shouted about being “gang chased,” “cooked” and “radiated” by the LGBTQ+ community, adding that this was causing him to develop cancer.

Evans said his fellow passenger was wearing “no less than 15″ face masks stacked one on top of the other and told others on the plane that “Trump is here”.

The man was handcuffed by police and escorted off the flight after the plane landed at O’Hare International airport. A spokesperson for Sun Country said the flight “landed without incident as a precaution, in response to a disruptive passenger”, adding: “The passenger in question was turned over to law enforcement and removed from the aircraft.”