Fight or flight
When air travel reopened after the pandemic, reports of ‘unruly’ passengers dominated the news, with stories detailing everything from passengers being bound with duct tape, to wearing thongs in lieu of face masks — the New York Post even has a section dedicated to nightmare flyers. However, data from the Federal Aviation Administration now shows the number of incidents getting back towards “normal”.
The spike in incidents aligned with the introduction of the FAA’s “zero tolerance policy”, enacted in Jan 2021. The policy was initially put in place as a temporary measure, but the 492% increase in disruptive behavior reports from 2020 to 2021 — with nearly 75% of incidents related to masking rules — caused it to be made permanent in April 2022.
So far this year, the FAA has recorded 926 incidents of unruliness, down 72% compared to the first 6 months of 2021. Despite overall cases of rowdy travelers declining going into 2022 — most likely in line with the phasing out of the federal mask mandate — the number of passenger cases where the FAA has pursued legal enforcement action increased from 350 in 2021 to a jumbo 567 in 2022. Last year’s surge in flight-related criminal prosecutions also saw passenger fines reach a total of $8.4 million, up from $5 million in 2021.
