Etihad refusing to board at AUH despite being medically fit to fly, airport police called and now being detained (Updated 2022-06-03 with resolution)

Don’t lose your cool when flying!

"Things escalated quickly and the airport police was called."

First, it’s a bad idea to throw angry temper tantrums when flying generally. Airlines are a lot more security conscious than they used to be, and there’s an understanding that an irate passenger can actually do serious damage – if not crash the plane, injure flight crew or other passengers. Remember, an airplane is a "Ship in a bottle" with no ability to get external help. So airlines are quite wise to refuse flight to highly reactive passengers.

Second, your friends’ timing could not have been worse. There has been an epidemic of "Air Rage" incidents, and the airlines are on guard against it and fighting it with zero tolerance.

Third, any airline has the local police at their disposal, but your friend pulled this against the state’s flag carrier*.

Etihad acted correctly. Here’s why.

And that’s assuming Boston, not Houston or L.A. Also the route would swing south to avoid Ukraine, and north again to pick up advantageous wind and standard airways.

This is a long over-ocean flight, with no readily available diverts in the middle of the ocean. Apropos to your friends, this means two things. First, the wife already had a health episode on the connecting flight. If the wife has another one that might be more serious, there is no easy divert. The "golden hour" of response would be sacrificed diverting. Also, the high cost of diverting a 777 full of passengers. And second, the party had already demonstrated a tendency toward "air rage", another thing you don’t want in a "ship in a bottle".

If you take "the view from 30,000 feet" as it were, the far more reasonable course all-around is to delay the passengers a few days in Abu Dhabi, where they are quite close to first-class medical care. Given that time, the medical situation will resolve itself (either recover, or culminate into something treatable for which a treatment plan can be made, and the safety of a long air-flight can be determined by specialists)… and meanwhile the angry person can calm down.

Get-There-"itis"

Why don’t your friends see that view? Because of a disease we call "Get-There-Itis" – or more formally, "plan continuation bias". The unconscious, unreasonable tendency to continue with the original plan while disregarding changing conditions.

This infectious disease, which every flier has had, is one of the most deadly in all of aviation. It cripples the flier’s ability to think clearly, and pushes him/her to do things they wouldn’t have otherwise done.

In other words, an emotional "sense of immortality" – the belief that nothing bad will happen to me, or that I will magically "not care because I’m dead". That doesn’t work so well for ones companions, or the company that agreed to participate. Etihad wanted no part of that, and declined.

This term actually comes from aviation, and Etihad is a top tier airline, so they know all about "get-there-itis". They recognized your friends’ situation in that light.

They weren’t wrong, sorry.

* By "state" I mean Abu Dhabi is one of several states inside the United Arab Emirates. Another is Dubai, which has competitor Emirates airlines.

This is something well beyond the scope of Travel.SE as it involves a potential disaster, including jail time and an entry ban. The priorities of your friend should be:

1. Forget about "justice" and accept that the Etihad ticket is now forfeited. Stop arguing with the police and politely tell them you’ll get out of their country on the closest available flight of a different airline.
2. Contact the US consulate and let them know about your predicament. They don’t have any power over local police but they can help resolve problems amicably.
3. Get a flight on any airline other than Etihad and leave the country as soon as possible.
4. Once you’re safely back home, contact Etihad and politely ask for a refund. If that doesn’t help, see if you can politely reach out to them on social media. If that fails, see if you get a chargeback on your credit card instead.

Never try to fight airline officials, especially in a foreign country. This is not a fight you can win, as evidenced by your friends predicament. Focus on getting back home safely at all costs.