Is Covid-19 making airplane passengers more unruly?

Stephanie Scherrer was settling in for her two-hour Southwest Airlines flight from Denver, Colorado to her home in Los Angeles, California. Her face covering was on, her hand sanitizer was ready, she'd wiped down the seats and her two kids were also masked up.

It was July 15. Scherrer, a high school counselor, had thought long and hard about whether she felt safe flying during the Covid-19 pandemic, researching driving routes and poring over airline policies. But she was reassured by Southwest's compulsory mask rule, plus its pledge to keep the middle seats open.

The aircraft had left the gate when Scherrer says she spotted a commotion several rows ahead: a flight attendant was confronting a man and a woman who were refusing to wear face masks.

"I hear him saying: 'Well, there's going to be a lot of lawsuits," Scherrer tells CNN.

The flight attendant, Scherrer says, reiterated the rules and the couple continued to refuse to comply.

"I got mad, because I feel like people wear masks for my safety. I'm wearing one for theirs," Scherrer says.

The next thing she knew, the aircraft was returning to the gate.

"At that point, people started getting angry, because I think they realized that we weren't taking off on time, because they needed to take care of this."

Scherrer says a Southwest employee boarded the airplane and started talking to the passengers in question.

"And as soon as that happened, it kind of opened the floodgates of other people going, 'I can't believe that you were so rude. Why? Why couldn't you just wear a mask?'

Other people were like: 'Yeah, I might miss my connecting flight.'"

Scherrer couldn't hear everything transpiring, but she could see things were escalating. She took out her cell phone and started to record the incident.

In her video, supplied to CNN, one passenger is heard saying they will not wear a mask because "it's against my constitutional right."

The situation concluded with the Southwest representative asking the couple to deplane. Once they had disembarked, the remaining passengers applauded the air crew and Scherrer breathed a sigh of relief.

Southwest Airlines declined to comment on the incident, pointing CNN towards its no exceptions mask policy, which the airline said is made clear to passengers during booking, a pre-trip email and the check-in process.

Heightened anxiety

Back in the spring, as Covid-19 induced lockdowns hit the United States and Europe, many airplanes were flying at severely reduced capacity as travel plans were canceled and people retreated into their homes.

But this last weekend, the US Transportation Security Administration reported airport security checkpoint traffic had reached a new high, crossing 800,000 for the first time in the pandemic.

It's still far less than before -- 31% of the equivalent 2019 numbers, when the TSA saw over 2.6 million people on the same day last year.

But the figures suggest passengers are returning to the skies and airlines -- amid reports of job uncertainty and continuing fears about the spread of coronavirus -- are trying to operate as smooth and hassle-free an experience as possible.

Pre-pandemic, many passengers already found air travel stressful. Missed connections, delays, increasingly busy aircraft all adding to heightened anxiety.

And the past few years have seen more visible episodes of air rage -- a term used for disruptive and unruly passenger behavior from passengers getting aggressive with air crew, refusing to comply with flight regulations, fighting with another flier or even, in the most extreme situations, trying to enter the flight deck or open the emergency exit door.

Data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) suggested that incidents involving unruly passengers were rising pre-pandemic.

The latest available statistics, from 2017, indicated an average of one incident for every 1,053 flights. In 2016, IATA reported one incident for every 1,434 flights.

However, the data isn't comprehensive: not every global airline is part of IATA -- and not every incident is going to be recorded. Plus, the Federal Aviation Administration, which compiles statistics for US flights, suggests numbers were down from 2018 to 2019.

But one thing's for certain, now that almost everyone carries a smart phone, we've seen more and more videos of brawling passengers splashed across social media, which has drawn further attention to the issue.

Covid-19 has changed the face of flying, with passenger tensions possibly higher than ever due to fears surrounding the virus. New regulations such as compulsory face masks add to the list of potential points of conflict.

An IATA representative told CNN that the group didn't have any statistics on unruly passenger data since March and that unruly passenger incidents "are still a tiny percentage of overall flights."

"We are aware of a very small number of instances where passengers have not complied with these requirements," added the representative.

source: CNN