How to Make the Skies Friendlier

by Robert McGarvey

How many more articles must I read that document flamboyantly stupid and obnoxious behavior of passengers? The latest one is headlined: Unruly airplane passengers are straining the system for keeping peace in the sky.

What is wrong with these mask refusing idiots?

One fact: the Federal Aviation Administration is incompetent. Per WAPO: “despite launching a ‘zero-tolerance’ enforcement policy in January — amid a rise in conflicts often tied to mask requirements in the air — the agency said that as of mid-July it had ‘completely closed’ just seven cases.”

What is wrong with those idiots?

There are two things I know about all this and the first is that until something like peace returns to the skies we will not resume full tilt flying and among the holdouts I believe will be business travelers. Lots of companies just will not feel safe putting employees on planes where fellow travelers include dazed and drunk mask deniers who joyfully slug flight crew, attempt to open emergency doors, and pee in their seats. Nope, most companies will hesitate to push employees onto planes until tranquility is restored.

The second thing is that I am unconvinced government intervention is the best option.

Airlines for America and some nine other trade groups disagree. In a letter to the US Attorney General, they said, “The federal government should send a strong and consistent message through criminal enforcement that compliance with federal law and upholding aviation safety are of paramount importance,.”

Is this necessary?

To me, the surest route to better inflight behavior is for the carriers to ban unruly passengers. Instantly. Over 4000 passengers have been banned in the last year and more should be. Besides, the feds can still prosecute. In many cases they should.

But the airlines can act much faster and can issue a ban without much rigmarole.

That’s appealing.

Meantime. however, I do ponder exactly how bad it truly is the skies, despite the many unruly passenger stories I have read. As of July 13, the FAA said it had 3420 unruly passenger reports. Let’s say the real, unfiltered number ought to be 10,000. (I’m assuming many reports just didn’t get filed because the flight crew had other issues to deal with and the paperwork never got filled in.)

On July 18, 2021 passenger throughput reached 2,227,704. That’s just one day of flying. The 10,000 unruly passenger number over six months is a rounding error, an inconsequential number.

There is just a smidgen of unruly behavior in the air. Annoying, unnerving, perhaps frightening if it is on your flight? Undeniably. But odds are slender that it will happen.

Now go back and look closely at the FAA graph that charts the incidence of unruly behavior from 1995 to 2020. Today it may seem high but there were 50% more FAA investigations initiated into unruly behavior complaints in the period 2000 to 2004. Initially I wondered if this coincided with the ban on inflight smoking but, nope, that happened in stages from 1988 to 1990.

Of course there were the horrific 9-11-2001 flight incidents and afterwards there were unfortunate and wrong acts of hostility on airplanes towards many people who somehow seemed Middle Eastern. But enough to warrant a spike in unruly behavior filings and investigations?

Color me uncertain exactly what triggered so many FAA investigations in that period. But the lesson is that what we have now is not so much worse than what we have been seeing for many years.

But my more pressing concern is how to get today’s skies friendlier and the recipe seems simple: ban booze in coach (alcohol is intimately linked with bad inflight behavior and some carriers already 86 hooch) and encourage carriers to drop the flight ban on ever more passengers. and publicize bannings, FAA fines, and all manner of punitive actions against inflight miscreants. Make them understand that their actions will have consequences and at least some will play nicer.

Misbehaving at 30,000 feet has consequences – when it does, the misbehavior will decline.

That’s my bet.

If you agree forward a link to this column to any and all airline employees you know. They can give us friendlier skies and the key just is to be unfriendly to a handful of rude morons who are violating our right to peace in the skies.