The COVID pandemic created a crisis of unruly passengers on airline flights. During 2021, the FAA recorded far more cases of bad passenger behavior than in any year since it began keeping records. The vast majority of the complaints – more than 70 percent – concerned the largely useless federal mask mandate.
Then in mid-April a federal judge in Florida threw out the mandate as exceeding President Biden’s authority. Voila! The rate of unruly air passenger incidents has suddenly dropped to their lowest level since late 2020. For the week ending April 24, there were 1.9 reported incidents per 10,000 flights, compared to 4.4 reported incidents per 10,000 flights the week before.
According to the New York Times, the FAA “declined to cite a reason for the drop.”
Hmmm. We can think of one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/