By Mark Walker
The Federal Aviation Administration said earlier this week that it had asked the Justice Department to consider bringing criminal charges in 43 serious and dangerous incidents from the past year involving unruly passengers aboard planes.
Since late 2021, the FAA has referred 310 cases to the FBI, following a commitment between the two agencies to collaborate more closely on the criminal prosecution of unruly airline passengers when warranted.
As of Aug. 18, airlines reported 1,375 incidents of unruly passengers to the FAA. In the past year, the agency has forwarded 43 cases to the FBI for potential criminal charges. These incidents include attacks on crew members, sexual assaults on passengers and attempts to breach the cockpit.
“There’s absolutely no excuse for unruly behavior,” Michael Whitaker, the FAA’s administrator, said in a statement. “It threatens the safety of everyone on board, and we have zero tolerance for it.”
Unruly passenger behavior surged during the pandemic, prompting the FAA in 2021 to implement a zero-tolerance policy for such conduct and begin issuing fines instead of warning letters to offenders. The agency reported approximately 6,000 such incidents in 2021, a sharp rise compared with about 1,000 reports in 2020. The number of incidents reported in 2023 fell to 2,100 but still represented an uptick from the years preceding the pandemic.
The FAA lacks criminal enforcement authority and can only impose fines for unruly and violent behavior, with penalties up to $37,000 per violation. More serious cases that the agency believes warrant criminal prosecution must be referred to the FBI. Typically, the aviation agency only refers the most egregious cases.
In April 2021, the FAA announced that its zero-tolerance policy would become permanent, even after a court order ended the mask mandate that had caused friction with passengers who did not want to comply. Later that year, Stephen Dickson, the agency’s administrator at the time, sent a letter to airport leaders highlighting alcohol as a frequent contributor to unruly behavior.
“Our investigations show that alcohol often contributes to this unsafe behavior,” Dickson wrote.
A 2021 national survey conducted by the Association of Flight Attendants union revealed that nearly all flight attendants had dealt with unruly passengers that year, and 1 in 5 had been attacked. The survey identified mask compliance, alcohol, routine safety reminders, flight delays, and cancellations as common factors in these interactions. Many instances involved multiple contributing factors.
“The vast majority of passengers comply with all flight crew instructions and follow all federal laws and regulations that apply to air travel, however, one incident is one too many,” said Marli Collier, a spokesperson with Airlines for America, a trade group representing the country’s largest air carriers.
The flight attendants’ union called for increased action from the Justice Department and the FAA to curb passenger misbehavior. In response, the two government entities established an information-sharing protocol for referring unruly passenger cases to the FBI. The aviation agency also announced a new partnership with the Transportation Security Administration, under which fined unruly passengers may lose PreCheck privileges.
Sara Nelson, the international president of the flight attendants’ union, said travel woes had helped fuel the rise in troubling passenger behavior. Struggles getting home because of flight delays and cancellations add to the frustration for passengers, she said. She also pointed to increased drinking at airport bars before boarding as passengers wait for delayed aircraft as a contributing factor.
“The entire system is stretched very thin and all of the basic human needs that need to be addressed for people to just simply be able to follow the rules and remain calm are now at stressor points,” Nelson said.
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