Airline Passenger Blacklists Won’t Stop Bad Behavior — The Real Fix Starts Before Boarding

The U.K. is developing a coordinated airline passenger blacklist where being banned from one airline would allow other airlines to impose similar bans.

That’s a frightening prospect – it turns a private company’s decision not to do business with a customer (for potentially uneven reasons) into a limitation on rights generally. And it’s not even likely to reduce real bad onboard behavior, which is often a function of substance abuse or mental breaks where calculation of potential risks aren’t forefront.

David asks – if not this, then what’s the solution to bad passenger behavior?

I agree that what is being discussed in the UK is a slippery slope and could (likely?) lead to uneven enforcement outcomes.

The discussion here in the UK is that there is a large increase in the number of incidents on planes since the end of the pandemic. My question is: If the statistics are correct and what is being proposed is not a good solution, what then can be done to reduce the numbers?

I think everyone can agree that while zero is not likely achievable, the current trends are equally becoming unacceptable warranting something to be done. I have heard banning alcohol at airports and on flights being proposed, but that seems to be punishing a lot of responsible people for the actions of a handful and the polar opposite of this proposed solution.

Gary, assuming the statistics are real that there is an increase, what would you propose be implemented to push these incidents back below pre-pandemic levels?

I think it’s important to keep the actual scale of any problem in context. The ‘numbers’ may be up but incidents are still relatively rare.

Reporting of incidents is up which is different than incidents being up (or at least, up as much as numbers suggest). The spike in incidents during Covid, related to masking, led to a hyper-vigilence and to a lot more reporting of incidents. That elevated level of reporting the incidents that occur has persisted.

• For the U.K., there were ‘over 1,000’ reported incidents in 2024 (3.4 per million passengers) but up from 390 in 2019 (1.3 per million).

• For the U.S., there were 1,623 reported incidents in 2025 (1.8 per million) versus 1,161 in 2019 (1.25 per million).

To the extent that incidents remain elevated, one factor is airline cost-cutting that reduces airport staffing. In the U.S. we’ve seen a greater move post-pandemic to boarding flights with single gate agent. It’s difficult to managing boarding, customer service issues, policing carry-on bags and getting a flight out on time while also still noticing whether passengers are behaving erratically or are under the influence of substances. So more of those passengers get on the plane.

European low cost carriers were already lightly staffed at airports. The trend to more automation and fewer staff has continued. And apps don’t have breathalyzers.

Meanwhile, banning alcohol isn’t just ‘punishing the innocent’ – alcohol was off planes in the U.S. for the most part for a long stretch of Covid and the incidents were worse as a result as people brought their own. Ryanair wants to ban alcohol in airports and make it available for sale only on… their planes.

United Airlines did a great job during Covid of managing incidents. In contrast, American tended to have more escalations, they didn’t give their flight attendants guidance other than ‘here are the rules’.

• United had just done de-escalation training for all of their flight attendants after the David Dao passenger beating.

• So instead of confrontations in the cabin with rule violators, flight attendants there would tend to ask the passenger to put their bask on and those who refused would get written up and banned from United (for the period of mask enforcement). There wouldn’t be a flashpoint in the cabin.

Any move to actually reduce onboard incidents involves (1) better training of cabin crew, a la United, along with (2) return to a staffing regime that allows gate agents to notice passengers who shouldn’t be allowed to board. If it’s worth the investment to address cabin incidents, given how rare they are overall, then these are the better strategies.