While there are still almost weekly news reports of bad behavior by angry, and often intoxicated passengers, the FAA says that air rage incidents are markedly lower than last year at this time, when it began taking a firmer line on incidents.
It's just a year now since FAA responded to rapidly-rising in-air incidents by abandoning its traditional response of "warnings and counseling to civil penalties" and began going for heavy fines and "legal enforcement action against any passenger who assaults, threatens, intimidates or interferes with airline crew members.”
Numbers started to drop immediately in the first quarter of last year, after a period in which FAA was reporting over a dozen unruly passenger incidents per 10,000 flights. The rate for the first week of January this year was 4.9 incidents, which translates to 76, including 43 mask-related.
Totals for 2021, said by FAA to be the worst on record, totaled 5,981 unruly passenger reports, of which 4,290 involved mask-related incidents.
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