The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced yesterday that it will be extending stricter legal action against unruly airline passengers, including those who violate the federal mask mandate, in light of having received over 500 reports of ill-behaved passengers since December.
"The number of cases we're seeing is still far too high, and it tells us urgent action continues to be required," FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said, according to CNN.
The FAA stepped up to establish legal consequences for disruptive passengers in the wake of January's Capitol Riot. In the days surrounding the incident, multiple instances of unruly, disruptive and threatening behavior by Trump supporters aboard flights made clear the need for the agency's intervention.
Several members of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 found themselves unable to fly home from Washington D.C. in the aftermath, prompting the FBI to consider adding those individuals to the TSA's no-fly list.
The FAA's stringent enforcement directive had been set to expire at the end of March, but is now slated to remain in force until the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lifts its order stipulating that all individuals must wear face masks when using any means of public or commercial transportation.
Dickson said that he has directed agency officials to consider either assessing civil fines or pressing criminal charges in cases of unruly passengers.
"I have decided to extend the FAA's unruly-passenger zero-tolerance policy, as we continue to do everything we can to confront the pandemic," Dickson said in a statement. "The policy directs our safety inspectors and attorneys to take strong enforcement action against any passenger who disrupts or threatens the safety of a flight, with penalties ranging from fines to jail time."
The FAA said that it's currently reviewing 450 cases of misbehaving passengers and has initiated legal action against 20 of those.
At least four flyers have been fined under the FAA's toughened enforcement policy, with the heftiest one being $27,500. In addition to noncompliance with the mask mandate, the individuals who have been fined thus far were accused of assaulting flight attendants, yelling obscenities and consuming unapproved alcohol in-flight.
President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA Sara Nelson called the FAA's strengthened enforcement directive an "important deterrent". The flight attendant union she represents was one that had called for the policy's extension.
"The patchwork, politically-skewed discussion around masks has created confusion and conflict," Nelson said. "We don't have time for failure to comply with the federal mask mandate. On an airplane, that behavior puts everyone at risk and we can't stand for that."
Any penalties imposed by the FAA are separate and distinct from those that could be issued by the TSA under its own set of security directives.
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