UK air industry witnesses a jump in unruly passengers
Helen YoungAccording to recent data, the air travel industry in the UK has witnessed a sharp jump in levels of disruptive passenger behaviour.
Between April 1 2008 and March 31 2009, there has been 44 incidents deemed ’serious’ reported to the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA)– an increase of 31 over the previous year in the same period.
Also, the industry recorded a total of 3,485 ’significant’ incidents during the period, up from 2,702 last year.
Despite the jump in these ’serious’ incidents, the data indicates that an incident is only witnessed in one in every 24,000 UK flights, or about one incident per 2.8 million passenger miles flown.
Male perpetrators were responsible for 73% of these recorded incidents.
The CAA defines a ’serious’ incident as an occurrence where the safety of a passenger or of the aircraft is compromised, including physical injury to airplane staff and a flight diversion.
A ’significant’ incident is defined as an occurrence where there is a cause for concern but without a major safety threat.
About 28% of recorded incidents involved travellers disobeying the instructions of cabin staff. Another 37% of these incidents involved a passenger verbally abusing people, with 76% of the cases directed at cabin staff, 21% at other passengers and the rest towards other plane staff, such as the pilots or the security staff.
One worrying fact is that 13% of the incidents were reported to involve arguments between passengers. The disputes usually were caused by seating related issues (like seats being reclined) and domestic arguments, where alcohol was found to be a contributing factor in the two categories.
A warning was given to the perpetrator(s) in 77% of the recorded incidents, while offenders had to be offloaded prior to departure in 10% of the cases. Some of the off-loading of disruptive passengers were done after a return to the gate, the aircraft being already pushed back to prepare for take off. In only 2% of incidents, the airline refused to provide return travel to the disruptive passenger.
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Filed under Travel News, UK News