Edit: Original site is paywalled and seeming to not always load, here is another article about the incident: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/united-airlines-flight-masturbating-incident/6551525/
Edit: Original site is paywalled and seeming to not always load, here is another article about the incident: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/united-airlines-flight-masturbating-incident/6551525/
Flight attendants have duties to attend to in case of an emergency upon landing. For example, opening doors and deploying evacuation slides. For that, they have to be at their stations.
If there were extra, off-duty crew aboard, that would have been reasonable. They could have asked if they had any law enforcement personnel aboard, or asked for volunteers.
The air martial should have been seated there
There almost certainly wasn’t one. There’s only about 3000 air marshals total, but over 10,000 airline flights per day. If there was one on the flight, this guy would have been taken into custody. I’d be surprised if 1 in 10 flights had an air marshal aboard.