Fight or flight: Unruly passengers are starting to calm down

Fight or flight: Unruly passengers are starting to calm down

9/5/23 8:00PM

Fight or flight

‍When air travel reopened after the pandemic, reports of ‘unruly’ passengers dominated the news, with stories detailing everything from passengers being bound with duct tape, to wearing thongs in lieu of face masks — the New York Post even has a section dedicated to nightmare flyers. However, data from the Federal Aviation Administration now shows the number of incidents getting back towards “normal”.

The spike in incidents aligned with the introduction of the FAA’s “zero tolerance policy”, enacted in Jan 2021. The policy was initially put in place as a temporary measure, but the 492% increase in disruptive behavior reports from 2020 to 2021 — with nearly 75% of incidents related to masking rules — caused it to be made permanent in April 2022.

So far this year, the FAA has recorded 926 incidents of unruliness, down 72% compared to the first 6 months of 2021. Despite overall cases of rowdy travelers declining going into 2022 — most likely in line with the phasing out of the federal mask mandate — the number of passenger cases where the FAA has pursued legal enforcement action increased from 350 in 2021 to a jumbo 567 in 2022. Last year’s surge in flight-related criminal prosecutions also saw passenger fines reach a total of $8.4 million, up from $5 million in 2021.

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The most watched soccer match in US history got less than a third of the views the Super Bowl did

Between a top-spot finish in the group stage, a sweeping performance against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32, and the president’s controversial intervention, Monday evening’s USMNT game against Belgium had, to put it lightly, shaped up into a box-office clash.

And though the US players’ performance on the pitch might not have lived up to the high drama off it, American soccer fans certainly showed up. According to early estimates, the 4-1 defeat against Belgium was the most watched soccer telecast in US history, hauling some 40 million viewers on average across the coverage on Fox and Telemundo.

That may be a record tally in the US for the sport that much of the world calls some variant of “football” — besting the 36.2 million who tuned in to watch the team’s previous knock-out match — but it’s still peanuts in comparison to the sport that shares the same name in the States.

World cup viewers chart — Sherwood News

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