Even in an era in which some politicians defend the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and side with parents who disrupt school board meetings, surely the whole political spectrum can get together on the issue of belligerent airline passengers who literally endanger lives with in-flight meltdowns induced by anti-mask sentiment, alcohol or whatever. Tolerance for such behavior should be lower than zero.
Yet as it stands now, passengers who get themselves banned from one airline can generally slip onto a flight on another carrier because there’s no industrywide no-fly list for disruptive passengers. Congress and the industry can and should change that.
Future historians and psychologists will be kept busy pondering why so many otherwise reasonable Americans seemed to toss civility aside and lose their heads in all kinds of ways these past few years. Was it some virulent strain of cabin fever brought on by the restrictions of the pandemic? Whatever the cause, many lately have decided that outright belligerence toward their fellow Americans — and especially toward authority in its many forms — is (to borrow a phrase in the news lately) legitimate political discourse. It’s not. And when it happens in a pressurized cabin at 35,000 feet, it’s potentially life-threatening.
By now, reports of airline passengers behaving badly should ring sadly familiar. All the major carriers have seen unprecedented spikes in confrontations between passengers and crew, or passengers and each other. Mask requirements on the flights appear to account for the majority of conflicts, which is outrageous, given that passengers know about those requirements when they board. At that moment, the issue is no longer about masks but about following the in-flight rules as set by aviation authorities consistent with federal law. Any passenger who decides in flight to flout those rules — whatever they are — has no business on a plane.
Airlines currently have wide latitude to bar disruptive passengers from future flights, but they generally have no way to know if a given passenger has already been banned from another airline. Delta Air Lines chief executive Edward H. Bastian is publicly pushing for the logical step of formalizing an industry-wide banning system with federal enforcement. The federal government already enforces a no-fly list for people credibly deemed to pose a threat of terrorism.
One suggestion that may make sense would be to add a category to the existing federal list, looping in people who have been convicted of disruptive behavior on planes. That’s a higher standard than individual airlines currently have to follow; they can ban passengers based on their behavior alone, even if they aren’t criminally charged. A higher standard for a total federal ban makes sense because an across-the-board prohibition from all airlines is a tougher penalty. But it’s one that’s justified for those who bring belligerence to the formerly friendly skies.
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