JetBlue Exit: Steven Slater in His Own Words

Oct. 27, 2010 — -- Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant famous for quitting his job by sliding down the emergency exit of a plane, said that he had been drinking on the day of the incident but was not too intoxicated to perform his duties or keep passengers safe.

"Truthfully, I will admit that," Slater told "Good Morning America" in an interview aired today. "It was one of those days that drove me to drink, and I admit that I did have a little sip. ... I was not intoxicated at the time of the incident."

Slater garnered international fame in August when, after an altercation with a passenger over some luggage on a plane at New York's JFK airport, he made an expletive-laden announcement over the plane's intercom before grabbing some beer from the galley, popping the emergency exit and sliding down the inflatable slide.

Slater told "GMA" that it was a combination of years of frustration with his job, personal pressures, one particularly bad day of flying and some drinking that pushed him over the edge after 20 years as a flight attendant.

Slater said that at the beginning of the flight that day from Pittsburgh, a woman accidentally hit him in the head with a bag, causing a bloody cut. It wasn't until the end of the flight, however, that everything came to a head. Slater said he got into a confrontation with the woman over her bag and, after a prolonged argument, snapped.

"On the way out of the aircraft, at the front door going into the jetway, [she] became very enraged that I couldn't provide her bag at that moment," he said. "That's when I started getting the verbal abuse and then, unfortunately, that's when I returned some of it.

"I was at the end of my rope. I'd had it. ... I call it kind of a perfect storm of bad manners on a number of people's part, including my own," he said. "I was angry. I was in a little bit of a state of rage."

Slater said he made the foul-mouthed announcement over the PA system simply because the microphone was already in his hand.

Slater said at that point he was "semi-thinking and semi-not-thinking," but it was visions of where he'd rather be that made immediate escape seem like an option.

"I saw this, you know, delicious ray of golden sunlight coming through that porthole. And I knew that the beach was just over there and my car was in the parking lot. I think at the end of the day, I wanted to know that I wasn't coming back," he said. "So I took a good look, and I said, 'You know what? That looks a lot better than this.' And anyway I went. The rest is history."