Bad Behavior Increase: IATA Wants Clear Rules on How To Deal With Unruly Passengers on Flights

Bad behavior is on the rise on flights and it's causing stress for those in the airline industry and fellow passengers.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) held a press conference last week in which the group announced that it will use a conference in Montreal in March to make an agreement on the right of crew members and captain to do whatever is necessary to control badly behaved passengers, Reuters reports.

Tim Colehan of the Geneva-based grouping gave several examples of recent bad behavior on planes such as fighting soccer fans, models screaming obscenities, a French film star peeing in an aisle and a woman who fought the cabin crew after she through liquor on them and proceeded to abuse them on the overnight flight from Europe to Thailand.

"Unruly passenger behaviour... is on the increase," Colehan said according to Reuters. " It is a problem which our crews and other travellers face every day."

Since the IATA started recording data in 2007, there have been more than 15,000 reported incidents. "But there are almost certainly many more which we never hear about," Colehan added.

Colehan says that part of the problem is that international law isn't up to date with global air travel. Unruly passengers often go unpunished because police say they have no jurisdiction in countries where the planes land. The 1963 Tokyo Convention also makes crew and pilots hesitant to respond to an incident. This law was originally made to deal with hijack situations.

"There is always the fear that they could be sued for assault if they restrain a violent passenger," Colehan said.

Among some of the other bad behaviors this year include a passenger who used
violence against a Chinese flight attendant, an American passenger who was watching porn on his computer, a South African couple that had sex in first class, a Russian woman who drank soap when the crew refused to give her alcohol and a man who stole a bottle of wine from the cart and locked himself in the bathroom to drink it.
Several years before, the 240 members of IATA were told that they should back their crews up and make sure bad passengers were taken to court. However due to legislation that isn't clear, this often leads nowhere.
During the March conference, IATA wants the governments to agree on a new convention that will make it clear what is acceptable to do to control unruly passengers. Colehan isn't sure how it will end. "We are confident there will be a new convention, but - with so many governments having to agree - we have to wait to see how it turns out," Colehan told Reuters.