Sara Nelson, the influential president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, said Monday the current conditions aboard airplane flights have reached epic lows.
"It's the most hostile environment that we've ever faced," Nelson told Yahoo Finance Live.
Nelson prefaced her statement by saying, "And I want to be really clear, it's a small group of people, but they have been emboldened and they have become more frequent than ever."
A recent survey of 5,000 flight attendants found 85 percent had to deal with misbehaving passengers, and one in five reported "experiencing a physical incident."
In fact, there have been more than 4,000 incidents on planes this year according to the Federal Aviation Administration, a good handful of them turning into physical confrontations.
Flight attendants, Nelson said, "are thinking about not having gotten sleep, how long the days are, how crowded the flights are, how screwed up the operation is, and whether or not this is the day they might get punched in the face."
Nelson said the pent-up demand for travel after 2020 was part of the problem.
"No one thought it would come slamming back like this," Nelson said.
Another issue? The airlines, like many businesses, have had trouble hiring workers.
"We're going to work with minimum staffing, we're going to work with longer days, typically shorter nights, because there are fewer flights to schedule us in an efficient way," Nelson said.
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