Not an open door environment

The Associated Press has done it again; misinformation supplied as news. They posted an article about an incident on United Airlines 890, a flight from LAX to Dulles in DC. A passenger, who "had been acting strangely for about 20 minutes", tried to "open the exit door" of the aircraft. Other passengers came to the aid of a flight attendant and held the man down (and punched him, though I can't imagine why, he was just trying to kill them) until an air marshal or two took him into custody. The flight landed normally at Dulles without further incident.
The fact that the passenger was wearing military fatigues with bogus patches on them probably added to the stress of the situation, along with his behavior: "The man... wrapped belts around his hands and threw punches into the air".

What's wrong with that reporting, you ask? Nothing. Standard straightforward AP style. The only thing missing was the little piece of additional information that you cannot open the door of an aircraft in flight. The designers of modern aircraft (since, oh, say, 1935) realized that opening the door much above sea level was not a good thing, and made sure that there were interlocks on the doors so that they could not be operated if there was pressure differential between the cabin and the surrounding air.
Even a flight attendant on UA890 was, perhaps, ignorant of this fact when she yelled at the unruly passenger to "get your hand off the handle".
Without that tidbit of knowledge, of course, most uninformed airline passengers will now be freaking out whenever someone innocently goes and stands by any of the exit doors...