Alcohol, anxiety, and abuse: Flight attendants say travelers are more freaked out than ever

On a routine flight from Denver to Houston in early February, a passenger suddenly began pounding the seat in front of him. When flight attendants approached him, he began punching a window, cracking the glass and bloodying his hands. That's according to an FBI affidavit that also said he kept at it until a group of passengers managed to subdue him with shoelaces and zip ties. A month later, on a flight to Washington, DC, from Wichita, Kansas, a passenger shouted violent threats at a flight attendant, another FBI affidavit said, before turning on a fellow traveler, taking his hat and glasses and repeatedly hitting him in the face.

Airline crews have reported 12,900 unruly passenger incidents to the Federal Aviation Administration since 2021. That year kicked off a grim new era of air travel, with a record-smashing 5,973 in-flight outbursts ranging in severity from rude or disruptive behavior to outright violence — a more than 400% increase from 2019. Though 2021 remains a banner year for troublesome travelers, the blight of bad behavior hasn't let up. Last year saw double the number of unruly passenger incidents compared with 2019.

Recent news has left people even more on edge: In a March Harris Poll commissioned by The Points Guy, 65% of respondents said they were more nervous about flying because of recent airplane crashes, a known risk of passenger misconduct. In total, nearly 90% of respondents said they're now afraid of flying.

Air travel can often bring out people's worst tendencies thanks to how much of the experience is out of their control — from inconsistent TSA procedures to the sky-high cost of a sad airport lunch. Researchers have also argued that the modern airplane is a microcosm of society at large, with its divided passenger classes replicating the inequality that plays out on solid ground. On every front, flying demands a healthy reserve of patience and goodwill toward your fellow human beings. It's a pressure test on the social contract — the idea that for humans to coexist in harmony, we need to commit to a set of shared values and behaviors that put the well-being of the group first. Being a member of a well-functioning society means not always getting your way and sucking it up like an adult. Flight attendants have a front-row seat to the state of this unspoken pact in all its glory or disrepair. If society is in upheaval, then the skies will follow suit.

These days, the flight attendants I spoke with say Americans' behavior could use some serious help.

The boom in bad behavior has been decades in the making. In her 2001 book, "Air Rage," the aviation consultant Angela Dahlberg writes that throughout the '90s, the industry steadfastly worked to overhaul air travel in the name of business efficiency and "an economy of safety." These changes came at the cost of comfort and customer service. Economy cabins became more tightly packed, and passenger legroom and complimentary meals became a thing of the past. Between 1995 and 1999, the FAA reported a 58% increase in flight delays due to aviation infrastructure that couldn't keep up with booming passenger demand. It wasn't long before unruly passengers multiplied and their disruptions grew more severe.

In the aftermath of 9/11, as fear around air travel spiked — and airport security became exponentially more frustrating — air rage incidents were widely reported to have surged. Industry veterans say things got bad again in the early 2010s. Kathryn Voge, who worked as a TWA flight attendant from 1977 to 1992 before changing careers to become a crisis counselor, was just another ordinary airline customer when she came face-to-face with an unruly passenger on a 2011 flight from Paris to Philadelphia.

"He was an American, and he was being so obnoxious — he seemed to be inebriated," she says. She could tell that crew members were in over their heads and, as a mental health professional, stepped in to help. "I was able to have a conversation with him and bring him down. But he was just so combative," she says. When she talked to the flight attendants afterward, they told her that incidents like that were becoming more common. Industry analysts again blamed airlines, saying their continued cost-cutting measures had made the passenger experience even worse.

Sunny McLaren, who retired from American Airlines in 2020 after 34 years of cabin service, believes that the proliferation of personal screen devices in the early 2010s was also a factor. Passengers these days tend to sit down, pop on their headphones, and tune out. When a flight attendant approaches to ask whether they need anything, it isn't unusual for the passenger to appear startled or annoyed, or even to lash out.

It's a pattern that both Voge and McLaren see as an extension of broader cultural patterns. "We're a lot more short-fused," McLaren tells me from her home near Phoenix. "I mean the country as a whole but also flight attendants and passengers."

The stats certainly back her up. Gallup polling has found that Americans are more likely to cite stress as a part of their daily lives than at any other point in the past 30 years. And in a 2024 survey by the American Psychiatric Association, 43% of adults said they felt more anxious than they had the previous year. Amid snowballing national distrust of information and public institutions, Pew reported in March that nearly half of Americans in its survey said they believed people have gotten ruder since the pandemic. While violent crime overall has been declining across the country for years, data from the Gun Violence Archive shows that road rage-related gun violence more than doubled between 2018 and 2023.

A few years of being stuck at home, combined with compounding global crises, have done a number on Americans. People are angry, scared, and taking it out on each other. In the skies, the breakdown of the social contract is unavoidable.

"Everyone's just so rushed, and then they sit down to decompress. And it's like, 'Wait a minute, I have to listen to you' — the flight attendant — 'too?'" McLaren says. "These passengers go through so much."

Recent years have supercharged the bad behavior. Public outbursts over masking rules became so frequent that they've earned the name "mask rage." When mask mandates were eventually lifted, air rage incidents held strong. In a 2021 survey of 5,000 flight attendants by the Association of Flight Attendants, the profession's largest labor union, over 85% of respondents said they dealt with unruly passengers in the first half of 2021, while 58% reported facing at least five passenger incidents during that time. A whopping 17% said they'd experienced a "physical incident" while interacting with a passenger.

The disturbances left veteran crew members shaken. "In my 25 years as a flight attendant, I've had maybe five unruly passenger events and only one that you could call 'air rage,'" AFA's president, Sara Nelson, told me in 2021.

That year, the FAA pleaded with airports to crack down on the sale of to-go alcohol, a practice introduced during the pandemic that was widely thought to exacerbate passenger misconduct. Democratic members of Congress went on to introduce the Protection from Abusive Passengers Act in 2023, which would have required the FAA and Department of Justice to work in conjunction with the TSA to maintain a no-fly list of unruly passengers. But nothing has happened with the bill.

The increasing flight chaos — from extended airport security wait times, rampant flight delays, and cancellations to the first fatal airline crash in over 20 years — has only prolonged the issue. By the time Anissa Perales, 27, became a flight attendant for a major US airline in spring 2023, unpleasant and unpredictable customer interactions were understood to be part of a day's work. That impression seems to have also spread to civilians, who often ask Perales for horror stories when they learn what she does for a living. "Whenever the question comes up, you can't think of examples because that's just what happens every day," Perales says.

Most day-to-day infractions are relatively minor — passengers might be talking loudly or watching movies without headphones, disturbing fellow flyers. Many refuse to comply with safety protocols, such as stowing away their tray tables or wearing their seatbelts. Intoxication is often a factor.

Perales tells me that she noticed higher passenger safety compliance immediately following the January collision between an American Airlines flight and a US Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River, which killed all 67 people in both vehicles.

When President Donald Trump blamed the crash on diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring efforts in the FAA, it rattled an already high-turnover workforce. "I know people who've taken leaves and who have quit," says another flight attendant, who was granted anonymity because of an airline policy prohibiting press interviews. "I personally am not thrilled about plane crashes or anything to do with the FAA being less safe. But also, a lot of us are tired of the noise." With the current political climate adding unknowns to flying, some flight attendants now feel the weight of their jobs even after they're off the clock.

Though the situation has improved since its pandemic-era peak, the problem is "by no means gone," Nelson tells me now, adding: "Flight attendants are still facing all-too-frequent — and violent — disruptive passengers attacking us while we are at work just trying to make sure everyone has a safe flight."

As international travel becomes more tense amid Trump's trade war and increased border scrutiny, flying remains at the uneasy center of major social questions. Every active flight attendant I spoke with says they can't imagine doing anything else, but they agree that flying isn't what it used to be.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.