Whatever Happened to the Friendly Skies? – The Wall Street Journal

More Americans are returning to air travel, and the mood is…edgy. The Journal recently detailed a survey of 5,000 flight attendants in which 85 percent of the respondents said they’d been forced to deal with unruly passengers in the past year. This week the Journal reported that the FAA has already investigated 628 episodes of disruptive passenger behavior in 2021—up from fewer than 150 in all of 2019.

Not a week seems to pass in which social media doesn’t chronicle an ugly episode at 30,000 feet. There’s nothing funny about it—it’s disturbing. I keep thinking of the crew, who already have hard enough jobs—they didn’t sign up to be bouncers at a motorcycle bar—and of course, the passengers with the terrible luck of being seated nearby.

It used to be that a passenger’s biggest worry on a flight was getting the middle seat between someone who’d brought a giant tub of homemade broccoli cheese soup and someone who wanted to spend the entire trip talking about custom Adirondack chairs.

Compared with the people making news now, that’s polite, manageable company.

There are a few theories for the uptick in air rage incidents. One is the face mask policies surrounding air travel. Some folks just aren’t into wearing face masks, and it’s not enough for them to simply write long missives on Facebook or freak out inside a Trader Joe’s; they’ve also got to frighteningly divert a flight to Tucson.