AJ Styles was part of the group of WWE Superstars stuck in Saudi Arabia recently. Upon his arrival home, Styles took to his Mixer stream to talk about the experience. According to Styles, he was informed by the flight crew about mechanical and scheduling issues which prevented the flight from leaving.
“We got to the airport, they weren’t letting us board,” Styles said. “What was the problem? Not real sure. I heard there was a fuel truck in the way and the guy who drove the fuel truck had left to go home. I know, this makes no sense. Why would he leave if he knows he has a plane that’s leaving? Then there were some paperwork issues. Finally, after 4-5 hours, we get on the plane. Then the ‘fuel something or another’ was broken. People can say, ‘It wasn’t broken.’ But I talked to the pilot and he said, ‘Listen, there was a problem. That’s a real thing.'”
Then Styles said they ran into issues with regulations regarding how long pilots can be active before requiring rest. It seems the plane was then not able to take-off as the assigned crew needed to go to a hotel and sleep.
“The problem was, we spent all that time, from 1 o’clock to 6 or 8 in the morning, waiting to get on the plane and them telling us we can’t go anywhere because the pilots had timed out. The pilots can only go so long before they’re not able to fly because they’re not able to go 24 hours at a time. They had to go to a hotel, we had to find a hotel. Were there guns and people like ‘EVERYBODY OFF THE PLANE!’ No, that never happened. Nobody threatened to kill us. Nobody was gonna get murdered.”
Styles then addressed recent reports that a financial dispute between Vince McMahon and the Saudi government may have played a role in the plane being delayed.
“I have no idea what happened between Vince [McMahon] and [Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman]. That’s not my job to say anything. Was I pretty angry about not getting home because I missed my son’s wrestling match? You have no idea. This was out of our hands and out of the pilot’s hands. There’s no point in getting mad about something I have no control of. We’ll find out as we go along why things happened. Or we won’t. I don’t know what’s going to happen going forward. I’ll deal with it when I need to. But I’m not gonna throw WWE under the bus either. It’s not gonna do me any good to throw anybody under the bus. Until I know more, I’m not gonna say anymore or say anything negative. If I did find out and I was offended, I would go to the source.”
H/T to Fightful for transcriptions
