This year’s headlines have been riddled with reports of “unruly passengers” aboard airplanes—a catch-all phrase that’s come to encompass troublesome passenger behavior ranging from a refusal to wear one’s mask to physically attacking flight crew members and sending them into hospital.
Just today, a combative Delta Air Lines passenger traveling from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles was reported to have assaulted a crew member and an air marshal in-flight. It’s gotten so bad that U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland two weeks ago ordered attorneys across the country to prioritize the prosecution of anyone who endangers the safety of passengers, flight crews and flight attendants.
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Twenty-one months into the global pandemic, U.S. flight attendants are finally saying they’ve reached their breaking point when it comes to wrangling unruly passengers. Policing the skies, and struggling to tactfully parry in the face of ongoing verbal and physical abuse from customers, falls pretty far outside the scope of their job descriptions.
Yet, this year, dealing with non-compliant, argumentative, drunken, combative and flat-out violent passengers has become a daily concern. With the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) predicting air-travel volumes will continue to meet or exceed pre-pandemic levels through the end of the year, flight crews fear that increased passenger counts will also mean increased incidence of air rage.
“Since the FAA started keeping track of reports of incidents like this on board, we’ve had more events in 2021 than we’ve had in the entire history of that record-keeping in aviation,” Sara Nelson, Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) president and a flight attendant for two decades, told ABC News. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began keeping records of unruly passenger…