For months, public-health experts have called on the Biden administration to implement a vaccine requirement for domestic air travel in order to slow the spread of the COVOID-19 pandemic. Now, some flight attendants are joining the chorus of those calling for a vaccine mandate for passengers to help slow another fast-growing crisis: increasingly unruly and violent passengers aboard airliners.
“If you’re the kind of person who would attack a flight attendant over wearing a mask, it absolutely tracks that you’re anti-vax,” said Marc, a flight attendant with a budget carrier who requested to go by his middle name to avoid being targeted for supporting a vaccine mandate. “It could genuinely save someone.”
As more Americans returned to the skies last year after the pandemic effectively shut down air travel across the globe, unruly passenger incidents aboard U.S. airliners skyrocketed to the highest levels in aviation history. Earlier this month, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released figures revealing that of those 5,981 incidents in 2021, more than 70 percent were “mask-related.” The number of incidents that have resulted in enforcement actions, meanwhile, has increased nearly 240 percent since 2019, before the pandemic.
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Such incidents have led to increasingly dangerous situations for airline crew and passengers alike, ranging from obstinate passengers delaying flights over arguments about wearing red thongs on their faces to cancelled and rerouted planes. The victims of these incidents are often flight attendants, who are tasked with ensuring the safety of everyone aboard. Recent incidents have led to flight attendants dodging hurled liquor bottles and suffering fractured teeth and broken noses.
“You deal with it, day in and day out, every day,” another flight attendant with a major carrier said, adding that she has come close to quitting out of frustration from abusive passengers upset about mask mandates. “It’s already a stressful, stressful career… and the amount of energy the crew has to devote to being the ‘Mask Police’ is energy we should be using to make sure that passengers and crew can reach their destination safely.”
The flight attendant said that she chose her career because she loves being able to help people face-to-face, but that months of tirades, grumbles and “child-like” behavior by anti-mask passengers has made her less trusting of strangers.
“This feels terrible to even say, but anything that would filter out the anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, anti-whatever,” she said, “would just make things easier.”
According to a survey conducted last summer by the Association of Flight Attendants, a labor union that represents nearly 50,000 flight attendants employed by 17 airlines, 85 percent of flight attendants have had to contend with unruly passengers as air travel returned to semi-normal in 2021.
Airlines have dealt with a surge in unruly passengers this year, many of whom oppose mask requirements aboard flights. A survey this summer by the Association of Flight Attendants showed that 85% of attendants had dealt with unruly passengers and that nearly 1 in 5 had experienced physical incidents. Nearly 60 percent said that they had faced more than five such incidents in the previous year, with one in five flight attendants reporting that the incidents had escalated to physical altercations.
“The vitriol, verbal and physical abuse from a small group of passengers… is unacceptable and puts everyone onboard at risk,” the AFA said in a statement accompanying the survey. “This is not a new normal we are willing to accept. The federal government, airlines and airports must redouble efforts to hold every disruptive passenger accountable.”
The Biden administration, the Transportation Security Administration, and the FAA have made steps to reduce the number of unruly passenger incidents, including launching a public-service campaign, creating semi-cringey memes about the penalties for disobeying flight attendants, and doubling fines for refusing to wear masks on planes.
In a speech announcing a slate of new tactics to fight the pandemic in September—including a vaccine requirement for all federal employees—President Joe Biden noted that passengers who break the rules aboard flights should “be prepared to pay.”
“Show some respect,” Biden added in an off-the-cuff moment. “The anger you see on television toward flight attendants and others doing their job is wrong—it’s ugly.”
But the administration has still avoided implementing a vaccine mandate for airline passengers, insisting that the White House’s scientific advisors have emphasized that those mandates are best used for international flights in order to stem the spread of viral variants.
“There’s obviously a range of factors that our health and medical experts look at, and they have not yet advised, at this point, the president on a requirement of vaccines domestically,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told The Daily Beast in a press briefing last week. “The reason they have given is, of course, that the requirement for international travelers helps reduce and delay variants or spreading to the United States. And we know that masking is very effective, according to our health experts, in protecting people on flights.”
Public health experts, however, have long contended that such a mandate would reduce the spread of the not-so-novel coronavirus domestically, pointing to vaccine requirements for air passengers across the European Union as a common-sense response to a highly contagious virus.
“Screening unvaccinated persons with tests could identify individuals with asymptomatic infections (or symptomatic persons who are not following recommendations not to travel), reducing the likelihood of contagious persons boarding airplanes,” said Dr. Timothy Brewer, a professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “Each of these steps reduces transmission risk, thereby protecting everyone on the flight.”
Such a requirement would also likely help screen out passengers most likely to cause a ruckus over mask-wearing requirements, said Professor Larry Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law Center, who called the Biden administration’s refusal to implement vaccine mandates on domestic flights “one of its worst moves in terms of COVID-19.”
“It would make a huge difference,” Gostin said of incidents aboard domestic aircraft. “It would protect fellow passengers and also airline staff from belligerent customers, because if a person is vaccinated, they’re far less likely to be anti-mask or or belligerent towards COVID-19 measures.”
“It goes hand-in hand,” Gostin continued. “Those who are vaccinated understand the importance of masks, and you would see a dramatic drop in belligerent passengers and violence and disruption on aircraft. So it’s a win-win-win all around—there is no negative impact.”
Psaki told The Daily Beast that she had “not heard that explanation internally” and directed questions about the potential effect that a vaccine mandate would have on unruly passenger incidents to the FAA. The FAA, in turn, referred The Daily Beast to the White House.
The AFA has spoken out forcefully against incidents of violence against flight attendants, who—like many other workers in the pandemic—have increasingly been asked to become mask-enforcement officers in addition to their already difficult professional obligations. But the union told The Daily Beast that its members “echo concerns expressed by the administration about the implementation and enforcement of such a policy.”
“Since the outset, U.S. airlines have leaned into science to prioritize the wellbeing of the traveling public, and we are encouraged that vaccinations are now providing an additional layer of protection for travelers,” the AFA said in a statement, noting that it had been informed by the Biden administration that “there is no imminent policy proposal regarding a domestic travel requirement.”
“We continue to collaborate with the FAA, TSA and other relevant agencies to identify additional actions that can be taken across the aviation ecosystem to prevent and respond to unruly passenger incidents,” the AFA said. “We also continue to advocate for increased and expedited prosecution by the Department of Justice for criminal cases of violence or assault against passengers or crew.”
That institutional resistance to a vaccine mandate for airlines continues to frustrate Gostin, who said that science and common sense is on the side of a vaccine mandate—and that what is lacking is political willpower.
“I’ve talked to White House staff that said it's on the table, but I gather that the decision has been made not to implement a travel vaccine mandate—I think because, frankly, the Biden administration has been worried about new mandates, because every mandate they try to put forward has fierce public and political backlash and also litigation in the courts,” Gostin said.
“The United States should do it, but we always seem to be the last one to do the right thing.”
