A vote for him isn’t politics as usual.
New York City’s newest mayoral candidate once hijacked an airplane with a handgun and demanded it be flown to Antarctica or Argentina to battle a make-believe group of evildoers, according to a report.
Aaron Commey, a Libertarian candidate from the Bronx, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia 17 years ago when he stormed the cockpit of an airplane at JFK Airport with a whacked-out mission, according to City and State New York.
Commey — whose name will grace the ballot Nov. 7 — ordered pilots to boot 150 passengers and crew members off the Las Vegas-bound Boeing 757 in order to parachute into the frigid continent, according to reports at the time.
At other times, he asked to be flown to Argentina.
Then 22 years old and delusional, he planned to wage a war on “Cabal” — a non-existent secret group that he believed would “take over the world through mass destruction,” he said later, according to the paper.
The plane sat on the runway for five hours while law enforcement officials and pilots tried to talk some sense into him.
In the end, it never took off and nobody was injured — but Commey was charged with five crimes, including attempt to commit aircraft piracy.
Earlier this week, the mayoral hopeful admitted his insane past might be hard for some voters to overlook.
“It’s definitely a valid question … ‘Well, how can we trust you, when you’re this guy who tried to hijack a plane?’” he told City and State New York.
But he has recovered from the mental illness — and is a completely different man, he said.
“I am not the same person that I was. I was definitely severely mentally ill. And in addition to recovering from my mental illness without medication, I am a completely different person in terms of how I approach situations and I’m committed to nonviolence,” he said.
In September 2003, Commey was found not guilty on all counts by reason of insanity.
But he said government officials refused to release him from a medical center until 2015. The “injustice” inspired him to go into politics, he said.
“Experiencing my own personal injustice, seeing injustice happen to other guys … that’s one of the things that had driven me to wanting to get involved to try to change the system,” he said.
It also turned him into a Libertarian.
“It showed me a side of government a lot of people think of in the abstract, but feeling it up close and personal made it all that more real to me,” he said.
“There was really only one party I saw that was tackling that aspect of government.”
Commey’s chances of winning the mayor’s race are as slim as can be. Most voters haven’t heard of him. He’s raised less than $3,000. And the last Libertarian candidate for City Hall in 2013, Michael Sanchez, got a mere 0.16 percent of the vote.