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Err Rage Remedies
Err Travel · September 7, 1999

Last week I pointed to the increased media exposure of incidents of air rage. This week, I'll take a look at what is being done in response to this publicity.

Many airlines as well as airline trade organizations such as the International Air Transport Association have been writing policies and lobbying governments to increase the punishment for airline passengers who misbehave. Michael Sheffer along with his wife Renee, a veteran US Airways flight attendant who was injured by a whacked-out passenger in 1997, have kept attention on this issue through their organization The Skyrage Foundation.

This pressure and attention seems to be getting through to Washington where Senators Harry Reid, D-Nev. and Bill Frist, R-Tenn. have introduced S. 1139 while in the House, Representative John Duncan, R-Tenn. has put forth companion bill HR1052. These bills would increase the civil penalty for interfering with a flight crew from US$1,100 to US$25,000 and ground unruly passengers for a year.

Canada is also getting more serious about prosecuting rather than "pleading" cases of passenger assault, and in Britain, police are calling for the penalties of those convicted of air rage to be increased from two to five years in prison.

All of this tough talk about slapping unruly passengers with big fines and prison sentences is well and good, but it misses two key issues: (1) Preventing troublemakers from boarding an airplane in the first place and (2) Preventing these morons from endangering a plane full of passengers after they "lose it" in flight.

Airlines might argue that the primary job of their ground personnel and flight crews is to provide assistance to passengers, not to assess their mental stability or to wrap them up in handcuffs -- and I would agree.

Nevertheless, most major carriers have taken some measures to address the tricky issues of identification and prevention. They have added some special training for their inflight crews, and a few are even giving gate agents some training. (That makes sense since a convenient way for a gate agent to rid herself of an obnoxious passenger is simply to board him.)

Along with crew training, a few airlines are also using another technique to defuse inflamed passengers. British Airways and Delta Air Lines, for instance, issue cards to disruptive passengers outlining the penalties they face if they continue their naughty behavior. That's right. They hand a card to out-of-control passengers warning them that if they don't shape up, they are in big trouble.

(Does this make sense to you? To me, as a frequent passenger, this seems like a really dumb idea. To me as a trained experimental psychologist, it still seems like a dumb idea, but I'll wait to see what the data show.)

The downside of all this is that passenger notification systems are not universally applied, airline crew training is usually just a few hours of classroom schooling, and there is no inter-airline standardization of instruction. So, in may ways, flight attendants are left, just like the rest of us, to their own devices to figure out how to deal with airborne whackos.

The good news is that there are some things that you can do to protect yourself should you find yourself five miles up in the sky with one of these unruly nut cases. Next week I'll tell you what those things are.

Dr. Terry Riley is a psychologist and travel security authority. His column appears on Saturday. Visit his site at http://www.appliedpsychology.com or e-mail him at riley@appliedpsychology.com.