A dad has described how he restrained a passenger who twice tried to storm the cockpit on a return flight to Manchester.

Phillip O’Brien, from Macclesfield, restrained the woman after she became disruptive on the Jet2 flight.

He told the Mirror the woman stripped to her underwear, claimed she had explosives and tried to enter the cockpit, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, after the flight had left Cyprus.

A fellow passenger told the Mail the woman had started screaming 10 or 15 minutes after the plane took off.

Mr O’Brien told the Mirror: “I spoke to staff and said: ‘Why have you not put her to the floor?’.

“They said: ‘We’re not able to.’ I said: ‘Well I am.’

“So when the woman went to the cockpit again I took control, took her to the ground and at that point the pilot did an emergency landing to Paris.”

The Mirror reports Jet2 confirmed the flight was diverted to Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport early last Tuesday morning so that a ‘disruptive passenger’ could be ‘offloaded’.