It was the German shepherd in Row 4 that finally pushed Veronica, a flight attendant, over the edge. He was Veronica’s third ‘unruly passenger,’ as the Federal Aviation Administration calls them, in one month. A week or two before the dog, a middle-aged man reacted belligerently when, just before he boarded the plane, Veronica asked him to pull up his mask. ‘Who do you think you are, you liberals?!’ he screamed at her. ‘These masks don’t work.’ Then he threatened to punch her in the face. About a week before, it was a group of young female athletes. The girls kept removing their masks when they talked to one another, and Veronica, who was working the back of the plane near the girls, repeatedly reminded them: “Please put your mask on.” (She and most other attendants asked me not to use their full names, either because an airline’s media policy does not allow them to speak without permission or for fear that doing so might hinder their employment.) “Please put your mask on,” a girl mocked Veronica each time she said it. When the girl got up to go to the bathroom, without a mask, Veronica asked again. The girl, who was about 5-foot-10 and towered over Veronica’s 5-foot-2 frame, said: “I’m so sick and tired of you, bitch. You don’t have authority over me.” They were almost body to body in the cramped area near the lavatory, and Veronica feared the girl was about to hit her, before one of the coaches intervened.
Finally, the German shepherd. He was supposedly a service dog (or one in training). He whined and whimpered as he boarded, and he whined in the bulkhead row near the front of the plane where he and his owner sat. Another flight attendant asked the owner if the dog was OK. Then, during the safety demonstration, Veronica leaned into Row 4 — as she has done many times when service animals were there — to point out the exit sign. The dog lunged at her, before the owner pulled him back. Then he lunged again. His tooth went through her pantyhose and scraped and bruised her thigh. Fortunately, the plane was still on the ground: A gate agent removed the dog and owner. (Veronica later heard that the passenger and her dog got on another flight.) Veronica told a manager, who was sympathetic and concerned, sent him photos and called in sick the next day. Two weeks later, she informed her airline that she was done. She quit what had, for six years, been her dream job.
Flight attendants often love their jobs. The wages are decent for an occupation that doesn’t require a college education and that provides on-the-job training: Median pay was about $60,000 in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with roughly 10 percent of attendants earning $85,000 or more. Attendants often have flexible schedules and little direct supervision. I spoke to about 15 flight attendants, most of whom talked about the rewards of flying: joking with passengers, having conversations with them about the honeymoon they are headed to or the funeral they returned from. Sometimes they pray with passengers or in other ways comfort them when they are in distress. They hold and rock babies to give parents a break. They also build lifelong friendships with other crew members and have jump-seat therapy, as they call it, with flight attendants they’ve just met. And they are proud of their lifesaving skills: They are trained to give CPR, fight fires onboard, help with emergency landings and evacuate planes.
The career also provides plenty of perks, which grow over time. An attendant with seniority might work just nine days a month (three three-day trips), jetting to Paris and other international destinations. Off-the-job benefits include often flying free or at little cost and getting discounts on hotels and rental cars. “I saw the world,” one recently retired flight attendant told me, “and it was the only way I could afford to do it.” On layovers, crews often gather for meals or drinks. They go to Disney World together, tour Capitol Hill, have picnics in the Jardin des Tuileries.
But pandemic anxiety, hostility and tantrums have turned airplanes into battlefronts. In some ways, it’s not so different on the ground for greeters at big-box stores, grocery employees, waiters, bus drivers and other workers whose jobs require that they remind people to comply with mask policies. They all risk being cursed out, spit at or punched. But airlines are a particular dumping ground for stress and rudeness. People are angry about wearing masks. People are angry at those who don’t wear masks. They are all tired of the long lines, packed airplanes and cancellations caused by weather and Omicron. (During the week of Jan. 2 this year, 10 percent of flights in the United States were canceled.) And if a customer spins out of control midflight, flight attendants have no escape and no way (despite what might be their secret fantasy) to eject the passenger. Instead, the attendant is required to uphold a federal mask mandate with little perceived authority — the public thinks “we are nothing more than cocktail waitresses,” one told me — and without the muscle of law enforcement.
Before the pandemic, unruly passengers — people who interfere with crew members’ jobs or intimidate, threaten or assault them — were so rare that the F.A.A. didn’t even track them annually. But in 2021 and early 2022, the F.A.A. reported a stunning 6,300 unruly-passenger incidents — more than 4,500 of them mask-related. And 85 percent of flight attendants said they had dealt with such passengers last year, according to a July 2021 survey by the Association of Flight Attendants-C.W.A., which represents attendants at 17 airlines. Fifty-eight percent said they had experienced at least five occurrences. (Sixty-one percent of the flight attendants also said that passengers used sexist, racist and/or homophobic slurs.) And 17 percent reported physical incidents. They described passengers shoving and hitting them, kicking seats, throwing trash at them. When a Frontier Airlines flight attendant duct taped a drunken man to his seat last August, it was after he allegedly groped the breasts of two female flight attendants and punched a male flight attendant who intervened.
It doesn’t help that people are also drinking a lot. Since January of last year, the F.A.A. has received more than 300 reports of passenger disturbances related to alcohol. And, so far, the agency has levied more than $161,000 in civil penalties for alleged unruly behavior involving booze. Airport vendors promoting to-go liquor — a pandemic phenomenon — are partly to blame. One flight attendant told me about a woman who tried to board with a beer when a gate agent told her to throw it away. On the plane, she drunkenly swayed back and forth and then popped open a 16-ounce Corona, claiming the agent said that was OK. (The crew removed her from the flight.)
‘I’m stuck in a tin can with this guy. It’s not like I can run.’
Other passengers’ bad behavior reflects a time of receding civility. Like the man who argued with attendants when they told his son to stop vaping. As he was escorted off the plane, he yelled at a flight attendant, “Imagine all of you in body bags.” Or the man who dumped a diaper filled with poop in the beverage cart, ending service for the rest of the flight. “The bathroom was three feet away,” Roger, a flight attendant who asked me to use a nickname that his friends call him, told me. “There was only one family with a baby on the plane, so we asked him. The dad admitted to it, but he never apologized.”
But mask-defiers create the most problems, and the greatest risks, for flight crews. An attendant with 25 years of airline experience told me about a passenger who repeatedly refused to put a mask on her young daughter. When she deplaned, after the flight attendant said, “Have a good night,” the woman looked her in the eyes and tossed a crumpled mask in her face. Last month, on a Delta flight from Dublin to New York City, a 29-year-old man repeatedly refused to wear a mask, pulled down his pants and exposed his butt, threw a can at a passenger and put his own cap on and off the pilot’s head when the pilot walked through the cabin, according to the F.B.I. Then the man made a fist and said to the pilot, “Don’t touch me.” Several months earlier, after a Southwest flight attendant asked a woman to buckle her seatbelt, put up her tray table and wear her mask over her nose, the woman stood up and repeatedly punched the attendant, drawing blood and chipping three of her teeth.
The threats are great enough that Roger, who has been flying for seven years, now avoids working as a lead attendant: The risk and responsibility aren’t worth it. Another attendant who asked me to use his middle name, Wilson, said he won’t sign up for jobs where he would be the sole attendant on smaller planes, like the 50-seater he worked last year when a passenger who was about 6-foot-3 and 200 pounds refused to put on a mask. When Wilson approached him, the man stood up and put his arms and hands out, essentially saying back off. Wilson was stuck 30,000 feet in the air with only pilots behind bulletproof doors to back him up. He reported the incident to the pilot, but when everyone disembarked, the passenger just walked away. “I’m getting all these emails from the airline saying we support you, and then I just felt alone and deflated,” he said. “I’m stuck in a tin can with this guy. It’s not like I can run. I knew he could whale the snot out of me.”
Roger said he has filed more than 30 complaints about unruly passengers and never received a response from the airline. The same with another flight attendant who told me that she has filed 100 reports. In the union’s survey of attendants last year, 71 percent said they received no follow-up from their airlines after filing incident reports, and a majority saw no efforts to address passenger conduct. The Association of Flight Attendants-C.W.A. has called on airlines to improve communications with flight attendants. “Airlines are doing a decent job of forwarding complaints to the F.A.A. for investigations,” Taylor Garland, a spokeswoman for the union, said. “But there’s not a feedback loop with flight attendants.”
When I reached out to several airlines about the issue, they either didn’t address it directly or said they review reports and follow up with the crew member or their flight leader. Some flight attendants told me that these days they either file reports only sporadically or have stopped doing it entirely. They are not only tired but also usually have to file reports during nonworking hours — and they aren’t convinced it makes a difference.
Flight attendants feel isolated in other ways too. “It used to be that I’d get off a flight in D.C., change out of my uniform, call an Uber and walk around the National Mall and Smithsonian,” Roger told me. “Now I go to the hotel room, order takeout, turn on the TV. I haven’t gone out for a meal with crew for a long time.” He has become, as he says, a “slam clicker.” Those are the crew members who, after the flying day is done, go to the hotel, close the door behind them, click the lock and come out only when the workday starts again. They used to be in the minority, but now flight crews are full of them, either because of their fears of Covid or just exhaustion. And in some cases, they have no choice. In Tokyo and Seoul, prime destinations for senior attendants, flight crews now can’t leave their hotel rooms at all because of national pandemic rules, except for traveling to and from the airport.
I talked to one attendant in January who called in sick because he was burned out after more than a week of 4 a.m. alarms and 14-hour days. Several months earlier he got stuck in Chicago overnight after multiple schedule changes because of delays and last-minute staff shortages. He was stranded in an airport lounge until 3:30 a.m. when his airline found an empty hotel room for him. (He had to wake up at 6 a.m. for a flight home.)
“How much more do they expect for us to take?” Nas Lewis, a flight attendant, said. “We are at our wits’ end.” Last year, when a late-arriving passenger got on an overbooked flight, Lewis, who has flown for seven years, scouted for a possible seat for her. When Lewis found nothing, the passenger yelled at her and shoved her. Lewis didn’t report the incident. “The day was long enough,” she said.
In December, partly in response to her own experiences, as well as what she was hearing from others, Lewis started a texting hotline for distressed flight attendants. The service, which is part of her nonprofit, th|AIR|apy, is staffed by 30 volunteer attendants who have gone through 15 to 30 hours of training on issues like depression, suicide and drug abuse and who provide resources to help. The first text she got was from an attendant who felt suicidal and was worn down by her schedule. There have been 3,000 messages to date, most of which, Lewis says, are about experiences of despair, thoughts of quitting, aggressive incidents on the flights and feeling unsupported by airlines. “We are getting messages all hours of the night,” she said.
Since the pandemic began, attendants are also turning in greater numbers to the Association of Flight Attendants-C.W.A.’s Employee Assistant Program, which provides help and resources for drug dependence, emotional issues, workplace trauma, financial problems and harassment.
Sara Nelson, the head of the union, testified before Congress in December, saying flight crews were “punching bags” and, among other things, called on the government to create a centralized list of banned passengers for all airlines. The F.A.A., meanwhile, has begun issuing harsher penalties for unruly passengers and investigated more than 1,100 cases in 2021 — compared with about 150 in previous years — and the government has started hundreds of enforcement actions.
Veronica, like many others, hopes that if the pandemic recedes and the government lifts the mask mandate (which could occur as soon as March 18, but is not certain), the violence and verbal assaults will decline. If that happens, she would like to return to the skies. In the meantime, she has taken her 3-year-old daughter out of day care and is a full-time mother. There’s nothing like flying. But for now, “instead of dealing with 72 toddlers,” Veronica said, “I’m taking care of one.”
Maggie Jones is a contributing writer for the magazine and teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been a Nieman fellow at Harvard University and Senior Ochberg fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.
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