Assaulting passengers. Vomiting and defecating inside the flight. Misbehaving with the crew. Urinating on a co-passenger. These are just a handful of the string of incidents involving unruly passengers this year alone. The latest of these came this week, when an Air India flight to London turned around 15 minutes after taking off from Delhi, because a passenger hit a woman member of the crew, and pulled another’s hair. The passenger was later arrested, but not before India’s civil aviation regulator asked all airlines to sensitise pilots and crew members on handling unruly passengers.
Taking a no-nonsense approach to this growing problem is definitely required. Such behaviour by flyers not only jeopardises the integrity of flight operations but also the safety of others on board. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)’s prescription of sensitising pilots, cabin crew and ground handlers with better training programmes to ensure effective monitoring and maintenance of order and discipline on board can help. But the rising numbers of such cases also indicates a certain brashness and assumption of impunity on the part of some passengers,and that can only be addressed through a strict and rigorous application of the law. Only this will signal that the plane is as much a public place as any on the ground, and any flouting of laws and commonsense guidelines will result in the same penalties, which are uniformly enforced. So the sensitisation needs to encompass not only the crew and pilots, but also the people they’re serving. And if needed, the soft touch needs to give way to more stern enforcement of the law. There’s no room for boors anywhere — least of all in the skies.
