Disruptive behaviour on board UK aircraft: April 1999-March 2000
Background
1. At the request of the Department for Transport, UK airlines have since April 1999 reported incidents of disruptive behaviour on board their aircraft to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), on a common reporting basis. The CAA has now analysed the data submitted for the year April 1999 to March 2000. This note summarises the outcome.
Number of Incidents Recorded
2. 1205 incidents were reported in total over the 12 month period. As before the incidents reported ranged from relatively minor infringements, such as arguing with other passengers or over-forcefully expressing dissatisfaction with the service, to serious misbehaviour. The CAA classified incidents according to their actual or potential threat to flight and personal safety, taking into account consequences such as aircraft diversions. Of the 1205 incidents reported, the CAA categorised some 519 as significant incidents and a further 74 were judged to be serious. The figures for the full year are closely in line with annualised estimates made by DETR on the basis of the figures for the first seven months.
3. Over the 12 month period no case was reported in which disruptive behaviour by a passenger or passengers contributed to an aviation accident. There was no case in which either cabin crew or passengers were reported as being injured, although there were a number where violence was referred to in the description of events, and at least one where a member of the cabin crew decided to press charges.
The Offenders
4. Some 76% of all incidents involved male passengers. About two-thirds of offenders were in their 20s or 30s, and about one-third of incidents involved people travelling alone. About 7% of incidents occurred in business or first class seating.
The Offences
5. The majority of cases reported could be described as general disruptiveness, with verbal abuse either to cabin crew or other passengers occurring in 55% of cases, and/or arguing with cabin crew or passengers in 49%. About a third of all cases involved disobeying airline staff. Dissatisfaction with the level of service was a common trigger for unruly or aggressive behaviour, while arguments between passengers often stemmed from domestic disputes, passengers objecting to noise or foul language, arguments over allocation of seats, or the effect of reclining a seat on the person behind.
6. Among the incidents categorised as significant, by far the most common misbehaviour was smoking in the aircrafts toilet. There were also several cases of aggressive or abusive behaviour; of repeated refusal to follow instructions - often regarding the use of seat belts; of intoxication; and of passengers exhibiting signs of personality disorder. Violence was involved in 13% of all incidents.
7. The 74 incidents categorised by the CAA as being serious included several in which passengers smoking in the toilet had either started a fire or had disconnected the smoke detector. Nearly all the remainder involved varying degrees of violent, abusive or unacceptable behaviour, on a few occasions including damage to the interior of the aircraft. In the majority of these incidents there was some evidence of alcohol abuse, drugs abuse or personality disorder.
The Consequences
8. In the majority of incidents a warning of some sort was given to the offending passenger, and the evidence from the reports suggests that the warning was effective in about two-thirds of cases. The true percentage may be higher, if some embryonic incidents in which a warning proved adequate were not reported.
9. In 13 incidents a passenger had to be physically restrained by handcuffs and/or a strap, and in a further 10 incidents other forms of restraint were used, such as having a cabin crew member or other passenger sit next to the disruptive passenger for the remainder of the flight. There were 8 occasions on which the aircraft had to divert when in the air, and 12 when the aircraft was forced to discontinue take-off procedures and return to its stand. The reporting procedure covered the time from embarkation to disembarkation, and in total there were 173 incidents where passengers were either refused boarding (usually because of drunkenness) or entered the aircraft but were subsequently disembarked.
10. Since cabin crew would not necessarily know at the time of reporting an incident whether further action was taken, there are no reliable figures on how many incidents led to arrest or other police action. There is, however, a growing body of police data in this respect. In the calendar year 1999 Heathrow police attended incidents involving 296 disruptive passengers, just over half of which occurred on UK airlines.
The Contributory Factors
11. As expected, alcohol and tobacco were (in their different ways) the two main contributory factors to disruptive behaviour.
12. In 607 incidents (ie around 50% of the total), alcohol was identified or suspected as being a contributory cause - and this may be an under-estimate if cabin crew reported only primary causes. Almost half of these incidents involved passengers drinking their own alcohol rather than alcohol served by the airline. The data confirms that drinking prior to boarding often has a knock-on effect on behaviour on the aircraft. There is still insufficient data to conclude whether the abolition of duty-free sales in the EU from 1 July 1999 had any impact on the pattern of the statistics.
13. Smoking, or the desire to smoke, featured in 449 incidents (37% of the total), of which 240 (20%) involved smoking in the toilets. The latter category of offence implies a degree of premeditated deception, and poses greater safety risks to the aircraft.
14. As indicated earlier, smoking in the toilet and/or drunkenness were contributory factors in the majority of the serious incidents.
The Context
15. The number of recorded incidents must be seen in the perspective of the number of flights operated by UK carriers, and the number of passengers carried.
16. During the 12 month period covered by the data, UK airlines operated about 1.1 million passenger flights, and carried about 98 million passengers. In this period only 74 serious incidents were recorded. This means that the chance of an individual passenger boarding a flight on which a serious incident took place was around 1 in 15,000, and that only around 1 in every 1.3 million passengers was the cause of a serious disruptive incident. Even extending the calculation to cover all reported incidents (and these included some very minor altercations), the figures would rise only to 1 in 1,200 and 1 in 112,000 [1] respectively. However, the risks to which individual airline employees may be exposed are substantially greater, and it is noteworthy that 18 of the 74 serious incidents included violence to cabin crew.
