US authorities warn its zero tolerance policy to air rage is permanent

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will make its Zero Tolerance policy against air rage permanent. “Behaving dangerously on a plane will cost you; that’s a promise,” Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen said. “Unsafe behaviour simply does not fly and keeping our Zero Tolerance policy will help us continue making progress to prevent and punish this behaviour.” SEE the podcast: Flight Safety Detectives dissect the Netflix doco “Downfall”. READ: Etihad Airways unveils its new A350 READ: Can the giant AN-225 fly again? The FAA implemented the policy on Jan 13, 2021, after seeing a disturbing increase in air rage incidents. Under the policy, the FAA issues fines to passengers for unruly behaviour instead of warning letters or counselling. The Zero Tolerance policy to air rage, combined with the agency’s public awareness campaign, has helped reduce the incident rate by more than 60 per cent. The FAA said it will continue to work with its airline, labour, airport and security and law enforcement partners to continue driving down the number of incidents. As of Feb 16 2022, the FAA referred 80 unruly passenger cases to the FBI for criminal review. The agency is also working with the TSA to revoke TSA PreCheck from unruly passengers that are fined by the FAA. About AirlineRatings.com Airlineratings.com was developed to provide everyone with a one-stop-shop for everything related to airlines, formed by a team of aviation editors, who have forensically researched nearly every airline in the world. Our rating system is rated from one to seven stars on safety – with seven being the highest ranking. Within each airline, you will find the country of origin, airline code, booking URL and seat map information. The rating system takes into account a number of different factors related to audits from aviation’s governing bodies, lead associations, as well as the airlines, own safety data. Every airline has a safety rating breakdown so you can see exactly how they rate. Over 230 of the airlines on the site that carry 99 per cent of the world’s passengers have a product rating. Given that low cost, regional and full-service carriers are so different we have constructed a different rating system for each which can be found within each airline.