Brawls, boozing and bad behaviour: Did people forget how to behave on planes and public transport in 2021?

As a journalist, you get used to certain stories – or certain types of stories – coming up again and again in the course of reporting on your specific “beat”. It’s no different on the travel patch. Pre-pandemic, there were a range of tropes that got stuck on a loop: strange emotional support animals on planes; airlines changing their luggage rules ad infinitum; popular destinations cracking down on overtourism.

The pandemic flipped this kind of travel journalist’s bread-and-butter upside down – for great swathes of the last 20 months, most of us couldn’t go anywhere at all. Emotional support animals stayed at home with their owners under lockdown; airlines were too preoccupied with taking a machete to their schedules to concern themselves with baggage policies; and “overtourism” as a concept was replaced by “undertourism”, as tourism-reliant economies struggled to survive amid draconian travel bans and border closures.

But, as domestic and international travel tentatively began to open up, the gruelling lockdown months gave way to a whole new phenomenon dominating the travel desk: mask rage.

It crept up slowly – a story here and there about a plane or train passenger, clearly one spanner short of a toolbox, refusing point blank to wear a flimsy piece of cloth over their nose and mouth because “freedom”. But, quicker than you could say, “Which variant are we on now?”, it snowballed into a regular enough occurrence that I started to wonder whether we should even bother reporting it at all.

What was astonishing was the speed at which situations seemed to escalate, going from 0-100 in a matter of minutes. Alarming, too, was the sheer fury clearly exhibited by those involved – often in the US, it has to be said – at the idea that their personal liberties should be in any way encroached upon.

There are far too many to list them all here, but in the last four months alone, we’ve seen a deluge of disturbing incidents. In September, a couple were filmed becoming aggressive and shouting at cabin crew in Florida after being asked to leave a JetBlue flight due to staff concerns over their mask-wearing. In the video, posted to Instagram, the unmasked man shouts and swears at flight staff for several minutes, even lunging at the crew member next to him.

Later that same month, three American Airlines passengers were kicked off a flight at Miami airport after reportedly refusing to comply with mask rules and arguing with cabin crew.

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This was followed up in October by an unruly passenger being kicked off a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles after he allegedly threatened to break someone’s neck for being asked to continue wearing a face mask and switch off his phone.

Even British former model Katie Price somehow became embroiled in the trend – in November, she was escorted off a plane bound for Las Vegas before take-off after allegedly failing to wear a mask, according to a fellow passenger.

More worryingly still, mask backlash on transport seemed to coincide with an uptick in episodes of passenger violence. Brawls – proper, full-on fights involving multiple travellers – became a much more regular occurrence. Incidents involving inebriated passengers were on the rise, too, despite several US airlines suspending the sale of alcohol on their flights, while the federal mask mandate remains in place. Closer to home, in one particular case a boozed-up traveller was arrested after getting drunk and headbutting a flight attendant on a Ryanair service.

Other instances of violence where it was less clear whether alcohol was involved included a passenger hospitalising a member of cabin crew, while another example saw an incandescent man breaking a flight attendant’s nose.

The anecdotal evidence of reprehensible passenger behaviour is borne out by the stats too: rules around compulsory mask-wearing have driven a surge in “air rage” incidents, according to airline body IATA.

In an article in its Airlines magazine, the International Air Transport Association reported that the rate of unruly passenger incidents had doubled in 2020 compared to previous years, and confirmed that the trend continued into 2021.

An informal survey of IATA’s Cabin Operations Safety Technical Group found that one member airline had recorded more than 1,000 incidents of non-compliance in a single week, while another had calculated a 55 per cent increase in unruly passenger incidents based on the number of travellers carried.

Wearing a mask is not, in and of itself, a particularly arduous task. Yes, it is marginally less comfortable than not wearing one, but as someone who wore a face covering for 24 straight hours in September 2020 while interrailing from London to Croatia (in 30C heat), I can say with some authority that it is really, really not a big deal. So I can only presume the unwarranted vitriol is purely on ideological grounds – that the irate travellers involved resent being told what to do by anybody for any reason. Which is, quite frankly, completely mad.

We’re constantly being told what to do. It’s an inherent part of life, and one that’s more often than not designed to keep us safe – for the greater good, if you will. What are road rules and traffic laws but a way of attempting to stop people from getting into accidents? The traffic lights are telling you what to do but, y’know, it’s in everyone’s interests to not drive through a red light and possibly kill someone.

“One explanation for the hike in incidents is that the context has changed,” said Tim Colehan, IATA’s government and industry affairs assistant director. “Not wearing a mask is arguably no different to not wearing a seatbelt or not putting your laptop away. They involve a failure to follow instructions.

“But because of the pandemic and the public health implications, not wearing a mask makes it much more personal and has caused confrontation between passengers.”

With new variants like Omicron continuing to spring up, it looks likely that we’ll have to follow simple public health guidelines such as wearing a mask for some time to come. We can only hope that 2022 is the year that travellers get familiar enough with the concept that they stop conflating a very minor inconvenience with an attack on their freedom – and stop attacking blameless cabin crew in the process.