DFW Officials Say Those Friendly Skies Aren't So Friendly Anymore

DALLAS, TX —The airline industry is on track to return to near-2019 bookings, which most consumers already knew when they suddenly quit seeing discounted air fares to anywhere.

Now the problem isn't the travel: It's the travelers.

This year, DFW International Airport may break records for the number of passengers arrested for interfering with flight crews.

An FAA panel Wednesday heard DFW's director of public safety Alan Black say that airport police have witnessed a 300 percent explosion in arrests — and that was before the pandemic, from 2018 to 2019. That figure plummeted during the pandemic, when air travel slowed to 60 percent of pre-COVID-19 levels.

In-flight altercations most often involve trying to cajole passengers to wear masks — as regulations require.

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When Black addressed the FAA, he explained the problem point-blank: “I can tell you that while we’ve seen passenger volumes sharply decrease year over year ... our business actually increased — unfortunately, the bad behavior,” Black said. “We have many less passengers but many more offenses in that genre.”

This is not news to airport officials, because while DFW declined to provide greater detail on their own arrests, the FAA says it has received 2,500 unruly passenger reports in the current year nationally, and the sky's the limit as to how many there'll be by year's end.

Just days ago, a Southwest flight attendant lost two teeth in a confrontation with a passenger on a flight from Sacramento to San Diego. The person responsible, 28-year-old Vyvianna Quinonez, was charged with a felony; battery causing serious bodily injury, according to the Port of San Diego Harbor Police Department

Lyn Montgomery of the Southwest Airlines Flight Attendant Union told CNN after the incident that flight attendants have been exposed to "increased levels of hostility on board, even when flight attentants are just trying to do their basic job and ask for basic compliance with regulatory provisions."

Montgomery says passengers seem to be angry almost before they board an aircraft and are verbally abusive to flight attendants, pulling on their neck lanyards and calling them names. Seriously?

She cites recent civil unrest across the country, worries about the pandemic and spending much of last year under quarantine as possible motives for passengers' impatience and lack of restraint.

For its part, the FCC is making an example of some passengers by fining the bejeebers out of them. Last week, a passenger was slapped with a $52,500 fine for misbehavior on a flight from Honolulu to Seattle on Delta.

The fact that masks have become a political statement is also sparking temper tantrums as the industry attempts to comply with safety protocols. That the Biden Administration enacted a mask mandate (in effect until Sept. 14) for public travel that ranges from buses and trains to planes and airports helped, they say, but only so much. After all, more than 70 million Americans voted against him and either resent his being elected or don't believe he was.

But this could all be simplified. People who babysit (which is really 90 percent of what flight attendants must routinely do) have long been acquainted with the term "nap brat." It refers to those curtain crawlers who will stay up far past their bedtime because there's no parent there to insist they go to sleep. So they get cranky. They become irritable and unreasonable. And soon, they're crying and screaming and thrashing around.

Airplanes need a time out like theirs— a portion of the plane just like they have at the back of some churches, blocked off and soundproofed. And while we watch Wonder Woman 1984 and Frasier for the fifth time in coach, they'll be hearing recordings of a no-nonsense Mom overhead.

"If you want snacks, you have to play nice," she say sweetly. And if that doesn't work, they ratchet up the rhetoric as any good Mom would. "Or as God is my witness, I'll turn around and we'll all go home."

Failing that, press play on the Greatest Hit of every Dad who's had it with you and your mess: "Don't make me come down there."

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