from hand luggage to electronic cigarettes here are the causes – Corriere.it

The exit from the pandemic does not mitigate the quarrels on board the planes which, on the contrary, continue to increase. And if before the frictions were triggered by the fact that people did not wear masks on board, now they are mainly passengers who smoke and increasingly who show up with oversized hand luggage or deposit them where they shouldn’t. Worldwide in 2022, one accident was reported among passengers seated in the cabin for every 568 flights, against one report made for every 835 take-offs in the previous year. In twelve, months the incidence increased by nearly 50%. as evidenced by the numbers provided by Iata, the international association of airlines, during the annual conference held in Istanbul, Turkey.

The document

The numbers, IATA clarifies, do not show the whole phenomenon since not all companies then decide to notify the police or the international information collection database of problems on board. The most common gestures among problematic passengers are failure to comply with the rules provided on board, verbal abuse and the state of alteration due to alcohol or drugs. Although physical violence remains rare, it has grown at an alarming rate of 61% since 2021, with one incident reported for every 17,200 flights, IATA said. In 2022, there were 27.9 million departures worldwide.

The reasons

The association of companies reports that cases of non-compliance with the rules decreased after the removal of the obligation to wear a mask on board, but their frequency increased again during 2022 so as to increase by 37% compared to 2021. For this reason simplifying the data, we went from a problem rate of 0.12% in 2021 to 0.18% last year. Moreover, a year in which everywhere in the world it was necessary to wear an oral protective device as a measure against the spread of the coronavirus. In 2022, these were above all travelers who smoked cigarettes in flight, electronic cigarettes in the cabin or in the bathroom, people who did not fasten their seat belts. But also too bulky hand luggage or the refusal to deposit the suitcase when requested, consumption of alcohol brought from the ground.

In countries

The data in the individual countries is difficult to compare also because the methodology varies and not all the numbers are updated. In Italy, for example, the reporting rate in 2021 was 0.26 for every ten thousand flights – according to data provided by our National Civil Aviation Authority – therefore well below the global average provided by Iata. In the US after the record of 2021 – precisely for the masks – with 5,973 complaints filed, the past year closed with 2,455 and from January 1 to June 4 of this year the figure marks 783 according to the FAA database.

The Montreal Protocol

Iata reports only reported complaints, for this reason the data of how many individuals have been involved is not yet known. This increase in cases is very worrying, comments Conrad Clifford, deputy director general of IATA. Although cabin crew trained to deal with problem passengers is unacceptable that the rules set on board are not respected by a hard core of people. Clifford calls for zero tolerance. And he points out that governments must have the possibility to prosecute problematic passengers, which is not the case today in most of the world due to the non-adherence of several countries to the 2014 Montreal Protocol: only 45 countries have signed the agreement.