Misbehavior Aloft Less Likely to Go Unpunished
Is it flight delays and crowding that trigger dangerous behavior among airline passengers? Or is it drunkenness? Or all of the above?
Airline logs for last year are a good place to search for the answers. In 2000, U.S. airlines carried more passengers than in years past with fewer empty seats, amid a steady drumbeat of airline labor disputes and a surge in canceled and delayed flights. With those conditions came unprecedented numbers of passenger complaints.
At United Airlines, the dominant carrier at LAX and the tardiest of all major carriers during the past 13 years, 63.7% of flights arrived on time in the first 10 months of 2000. The industry overall was 74.6% on time, down from about 78% during the previous dozen years.
On United’s main L.A. rival, Southwest, one passenger’s behavior created perhaps the year’s most troubling air rage incident. On an Aug. 11 flight from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City, Jonathan Burton, 19, died of suffocation while being subdued by fellow passengers. He had kicked a hole in the cockpit door, punched passengers and spoke of flying the plane, witnesses said. Federal authorities filed no charges against the passengers, saying they acted in self-defense.
Such incidents grab attention and may lead a casual traveler to imagine that abuse and violence aloft are reaching epidemic proportions. Certainly, the reports of bad behavior occur regularly.
In November, a 44-year-old Santa Monica man was fined $5,000 by a Canadian judge for swearing at and threatening Virgin Atlantic flight attendants. They had cut off his alcohol service on a Nov. 2 flight from England to Los Angeles.
On Dec. 12, a 46-year-old Texan forced a Honolulu-Dallas flight on American Airlines into an emergency landing at LAX after he allegedly threatened crew members with a 2-inch knife. An FBI spokeswoman said the man was taken to a local hospital for evaluation, then jailed until his case could be heard. He was still in custody last week.
Nevertheless, two nationwide indicators suggest that even as flights have filled and on-time performance has slipped, incidents of serious air rage have leveled off. In fact, industry veterans are divided on the question of whether passengers these days are abusing attendants more often or getting punished for it more often.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s tally of enforcement actions nationwide against “unruly passengers” grew from 146 in 1995 to 320 in 1997. The 1998 figure was 282. The 1999 figure was 318. And in the first nine months of 2000, the FAA counted 211 such cases, a slightly slower pace than in 1998 or 1999.
“It gets a lot of attention whenever there’s an incident, but our numbers are going down,” said FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto.
Statistics on FBI arrests are even flatter than the FAA’s incident reports. Usually, when major incidents occur in flight, pilots call authorities on the ground, and FBI agents are waiting at the airport to make arrests under federal law.
In 1997 the agency reported 56 post-flight airport arrests nationwide; in 1998, 59; in 1999, 53. At mid-December, the total for 2000 was 49.
The FBI’s tally at LAX through mid-December was six arrests, although local FBI spokeswoman Laura Bosley noted that agents typically respond to one or two incidents weekly. Alcohol was a factor in most of those cases, Bosley said.
“We don’t see air rage going up,” Bosley said.
If you compare current figures with those of six or eight years ago, “there has certainly been an increase in prosecutions,” said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles. But, he said, that might be due to “increased vigilance” among flight crews and a “better understanding” of what behavior can be prosecuted as a federal crime.
Federal aviation regulations say that “no person may assault, threaten, intimidate or interfere with a crew member in the performance of the crew member’s duties aboard an aircraft being operated.” Penalties vary widely.
One outgrowth of air-rage awareness is the Skyrage Foundation, telephone (888) TELE-JET (835-3538), Internet https://www.skyrage .org, created by US Airways flight attendant Renee Sheffer and her husband, Michael, after she was beaten up by a passenger on an LAX-Baltimore flight in December 1997. (The assailant was sentenced to three years’ probation along with a community service assignment, Michael Sheffer said.)
The group, based in Charlotte, N.C., keeps an archive of in-flight incidents. Noting the FAA and FBI numbers omit all but the most extreme cases, Michael Sheffer laments the absence of solid numbers on less dramatic misbehavior. But he says awareness has increased.
Thanks to that heightened awareness, Sheffer said, he can list steps being taken by U.S. and foreign carriers: Delta Airlines in September created a new job for a manager of air rage and workplace violence programs. In November, Swissair announced it would issue plastic handcuffs to flight attendants.
The Washington, D.C.-based Assn. of Flight Attendants, which represents 50,000 attendants at 27 airlines, in November asked the FAA to mandate that airlines spend more time training attendants in dispute resolution and handling intoxicated travelers.
“Sometimes when people have to spend time waiting for a plane, they spend it waiting in a bar,” said spokeswoman Dawn Deeks, who concurs that alcohol and delayed flights seem to be factors.
Ed Stewart, a spokesman for Southwest Airlines, suggests that “air rage” is too broad a term, because it’s applied to anything from a rude remark to a foot through the cockpit door. And though alcohol is a common element, the passengers’ motivations often remain unknown, as in the case of the 19-year-old killed by fellow passengers.
Though tests showed marijuana and cocaine in Burton’s system, authorities said they probably weren’t central to the incident.
“He just wanted to fly the plane,” Stewart said. “That’s not air rage. That’s attempted hijacking.”
*
Christopher Reynolds welcomes comments and suggestions but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012 or e-mail chris.reynolds@latimes.com.
