The Crown Jewel pay-per-view aired from Saudi Arabia on Sunday, but many WWE Superstars had problems leaving the country after the event, and WWE later issued a statement saying that the delays were caused by “several aircraft problems including mechanical issues.”
AJ Styles shared his experience from his trip to Saudi Arabia while streaming on his Mixer account, and he explained what he was told by the pilot of the plane.
“We got to the airport, they weren’t letting us board. 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.’ 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.”
It’s been rumored that there were money issues between WWE and Saudi Arabia that played into the delays, but AJ Styles noted that he’s not going to throw WWE under the bus.
“I have no idea what happened between Vince and [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.”
Quite a few WWE Superstars have commented on the trip to Saudi Arabia on social media, but as of this writing WWE has yet to acknowledge any other issues from the trip outside of what was mentioned in their statement.
H/T Fightful
