18 hours ago
Air rage rising: from insults to sexual comments and assault, ‘it's getting completely out of hand'
The worst experience that Sinéad Whiston has ever had on a flight was when a passenger was 'verbally abusive and trying to damage the aircraft'.
'It was a 4¼-hour flight spent trying to de-escalate someone's behaviour the whole time. I was counting down the clock all the way to Dublin so that we could just get this person off the aircraft,' she says.
Whiston, a senior member of cabin crew with
Aer Lingus
, spoke to The Irish Times on Wednesday, the day before Ryanair announced it would in future fine passengers who have to be 'offloaded' from one of their aircraft €500.
The company is already suing a passenger for €15,000 after a flight bound for Lanzarote in the Canary Islands last year had to be diverted to Porto. Those on board were forced to overnight in the Portuguese city.
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The company says the wider problem is getting worse, with drugs and alcohol increasingly factors.
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Ryanair demands two-drink limit for passengers at airports
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Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary recently lamented that drunken passengers didn't simply get on board and fall asleep because drugs are often part of the mix and they are 'much more energised or aggressive'.
The number of serious incidents dealt with in the first five months of this year by
An Garda Síochána
at
Dublin Airport
has increased to 32. This is three times what it was in the same period in 2020, and more than for the
entirety of last year
.
Sinéad Whiston at Dublin Airport. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
At Ballymun Garda station, which has responsibility for the airport, Supt Darren McCarthy lists the sorts of offences people are typically charged with, including abusive behaviour, obstructing a Garda and assault. The common factor, he says, is intoxication, an offence in itself on a passenger aircraft.
'They're all related to alcohol or drugs – well, more than 90 per cent of them,' he says.
The most common illegal drug involved is cocaine 'which is across society', he says. A large proportion of the people who cause the most serious issues on flights have taken cocaine, alcohol or prescription medication, or some combination of the three, he says.
'They could be on ordinary medication for depression or anything like that. They could be mixing drugs with tablets, with alcohol, and then they get this reaction even they don't understand,' he says.
The majority of those arrested are first-time offenders, many of whom might not have considered themselves capable of the behaviour.
Retired judge Patrick Durcan, who dealt with cases from Shannon Airport when based in Co Clare, recalls Ralph Lauren's niece, Jennifer, appearing before him in 2014. She faced charges of being intoxicated on a New York-bound flight that had to divert to Shannon, and was fined €2,000.
The
case
of Cranberries singer, the late
Dolores O'Riordan
, who pleaded guilty to a number of air rage-related offences while on a flight from New York in 2015, he recalls as 'very sad'.
He also remembers 'an English passenger who thought the seat belt might make a nice present and tried to bring it with him before being nabbed'.
'They tended to be quite individual cases,' he says of those he encountered, 'a lot of them involving people who were overcome with drink, or drugs or tiredness.'
Cabin crew member Angel Garcia
Whiston's Aer Lingus colleague Angel Garcia recalls an incident in which a passenger overdosed, apparently on CBD gummies – cannabidiol (CBD) is an active ingredient in cannabis – and lost consciousness just before take-off on a flight from the United States, where they are legal.
'We had to deliver first aid and get them looked after by paramedics on the ground. But this was on a long-haul flight. We were so lucky we caught it on the ground,' he says.
The one time Garcia was assaulted, he says, he was lucky it was in Europe – but the incident raised other issues.
'I was walking on the cabin aisle, and this passenger, she had been problematic. It was a woman. It was in relation to drink.
'Now we have techniques we are trained in to de-escalate a situation, to try and get people to be reasonable, to understand their behaviour could have a lot of consequences, that they're not the only one on board. But at that stage, we had already been through the de-escalation and it wasn't working out.
'Eventually, I was walking down the cabin aisle and she slapped my ass. I said: 'Excuse me, that is really not appropriate.'
'What she said to me was – and sorry, this is very descriptive – 'I'm sure if I had a dick in between my legs, you wouldn't have an issue'.
'At that stage, you're left in a situation where you're like: 'What do I do now?' You're up in the air. At 35,000ft.'
Garcia and Whiston, both of whom represent other cabin crew as committee members of the trade union
Fórsa
, say their training is excellent, with much more emphasis on the issues involved than when they started in the industry, 11 and 18 years ago respectively. Garcia began his career with
Ryanair
; Whiston with a charter airline.
That the problem of abuse is now being so prioritised, says Whiston, is an indication of how it has evolved and grown in recent years.
Some of what cabin crew are taught, and subsequently learn on the job, is about spotting potential problems before they happen.
'It's not common knowledge,' she says, 'but it is illegal to be intoxicated on an aircraft. So if you're coming down a jet bridge and you're intoxicated, you're not flying today because we don't want to take that problem into the sky.'
When the cabin crew are smiling and welcoming passengers on-board, they are weighing up who might prove to be an issue.
It can quickly change from a point when 'everyone's smiling, everything's fine to behaviour suddenly becoming a problem in the sky. That's when we can have challenges.'
For all of that, she says, '99.9 per cent of passengers are absolutely lovely,' but that tiny minority, says Garcia, are 'a massive issue' – one that's getting 'completely out of hand'.
Things are not helped, he says, by the fact staff are conscious in every instance that their handling of a situation will be filmed by other passengers and posted on social media.
Their full-time union official, Lisa Connell, says members tell, most commonly, of being verbally abused, ignored when giving instructions or disrespected. Stories of being spat at or assaulted also come up.
The airlines, she says, are supportive, although there can be longer-term impacts on staff, including stress. They take the incidents seriously and tend to pursue cases where possible.
Supt McCarthy says better reporting and more collaboration, including the release of staff for court appearances, has helped An Garda Síochána to pursue culprits, with almost all serious incidents on flights coming into Dublin leading to prosecutions.
Outbound flights can be a different story. Jurisdictional issues often lead to offenders, many of them Irish, simply being let go by local police, the scenario that prompted Ryanair to take a civil action in the wake of the Porto incident.
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Ryanair seeks €15,000 in damages from passenger over alleged 'inexcusable' behaviour that disrupted flight
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'They said: 'Look, we're not going to pursue this,' and we said: 'We're not going to settle for that, we'll take our own case,'' says the airline's director of communications, Jade Kirwan.
'It is less about kind of recouping the cost and more about setting an example.'
The costs can be very considerable. A decade ago United Airlines put the cost of diverting a flight between Amsterdam and Chicago to Belfast, after a hungry passenger demanded more snacks, at £350,000 – much of it down to the 50,000 litres of fuel that had to be dumped before the plane landed.
Ryanair operates about 3,500 flights carrying 630,000 passengers each day across Europe. Kirwan says its staff have to deal with a seriously disruptive passenger on average in three of every 1,000 flights. The figure is slightly above the international industry one but is also more up to date.
'It's a huge issue caused by a tiny handful of people but the ripple effect is phenomenal for passengers, for crew, for the wider operation,' she says.
Many of the incidents start innocently enough, says Kirwan.
'A few scoops, then my flight's delayed an hour, two hours, and then they're sitting in the bar because there's nothing else to do. And then by the time it gets to the flight, it kind of escalates.
'Typically, you'll see it on the likes of flights to Tenerife, Ibiza, hen destinations, stag destinations, sometimes around sporting events and stuff, but it's not exclusive in to them in any way. It is across the board.'
