December 28, 2023
Throwing punches, cursing out the staff, opening emergency exits – no – I’m not talking about bad behavior at your local bar.
I’m talking about bad behavior on airplanes. Yeah – in 2023 people are still being unruly. It’s still bad and now – and as we move into the two busiest days of the holiday travel season – tomorrow and Monday — the f-a-a announced there’s a brand new penalty besides you know a huge fine and possibly jail time if you have to be removed from the plane.
I’ll get to that in a second – but first — we are still talking about people acting up on planes. How embarrassing. Yes – the numbers have shockingly stayed much higher than pre pandemic levels.
The FAA put out this chart. You can see obviously the peak of unruly behavior was in 2021 when there were almost 6-thousand unruly passenger reports that’s a nearly 500% increase over the year before!!!! Last year the unruly passenger reports fell by about 60% to about 2500 and as of December 17th, the FAA says the reports are down again to about 2000. But that’s still well above the numbers before 2020.
Now last year – 2022 – the FAA made more than 2400 unruly passenger reports, of those 831 investigations were initiated, of those 567 enforcement actions were taken against an unruly passenger and they faced a total of $8.4 million in fines – in just 2022.
In case you need a quick refresher interfering with the duties of an airline crewmember is a violation of federal law. And we know from the videos that can mean lots of things. But here’s what you may not know – if you get dragged off a plane for being unruly – aside from the possible crimes you may be charged with — the f-a-a can also propose up to a $37,000 fine per violation. Keep in mind, one incident can result in multiple violations.
We know – some airlines keep a list of unruly passengers and may ban you from traveling with that airline in the future but you may not know — the FAA also keeps a database of everyone that is reported by the airline crew as an unruly passenger. And just recently — the -FAA introduced another penalty.
Passengers facing fines because their unruly behavior will also have their TSA precheck eligibility revoked.
Read more from FAA about unruly passengers here.
