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Mile-High Madness
The Travel Critic · December 7, 1998

It took two off-duty pilots, a military policeman and a 5-foot-4, 98-pound flight attendant to subdue and hog-tie a menacing passenger on US Airways Flight 38.

The passenger had dropped acid and then tried to force his way into the cockpit to "bless the pilot." During the struggle, he tossed the flight attendant, Renee Sheffer, across three rows of seats into the overhead luggage compartment like a ragdoll. Now, less than a month before he goes to trial in a Baltimore federal court, most of Sheffer's physical wounds have healed, but not her psychological ones. She says she suffers post-traumatic stress syndrome and is on indefinite leave from work.

In the year since her violent encounter, she says, passengers have turned increasingly aggressive. Meanwhile, U.S. carriers seem oblivious. "I think it's going to take a plane crash before anyone does anything about this," she says.

Richard Branson shares her concerns. The Virgin Atlantic Airways chairman supports a plan to blacklist potentially deadly "air rage" passengers and ban them from flights worldwide. "It needs draconian measures like that to make people think twice before they behave in that manner on planes."

The German pilots' association recently suggested parceling out nicotine gum to smokers who get cut off from their cigarettes. It also wants to limit the number of drinks served by flight attendants.

And, although British Airways isn't marketing it as such, its move last month to redesign the fleet's economy class cabins at a cost of $251 million is sure to soothe some of the discontent over cramped conditions.

It's easy to see why the Europeans are troubled by air rage. A string of recent midair disruptions have tainted the skies over the continent.

On Dec. 5, a Finnish passenger who assaulted several crew members on a Malev Hungarian airliner died after he was strapped to his seat and a doctor on board injected him with tranquilizers. An autopsy indicated he died from a mixture of the tranquilizer and another drug or alcohol.

In other recent incidents, flight attendant Fiona Weir was beaten over the head with a broken vodka bottle on a flight to Spain. British pop star Ian Brown was jailed for threatening to cut off a crew member's hand. Traveler Elisabeth Elliott (no relation to yours truly) reportedly bit and kicked a flight attendant and assaulted the co-pilot on a British Airways flight after being refused a drink. She went to jail for 15 months.

American passengers are just as bad. But where's our sense of outrage? Where are our proposals to curtail this mile-high madness? There are none - at least on the order of the European ideas.

"It's a very serious situation," says Mary Kay Hanke, a spokeswoman for the Washington, DC-based Association of Flight Attendants. "This problem continues to grow and escalate. The cases are more egregious. We have flight attendants who have required hospitalization, who can't return to work."

Hanke thinks there's a good reason for the lack of concrete proposals: no one really understands the cause of so-called cabin fever. Is it the increasingly small seats? Something in the air? Too much alcohol? The endless delays?

"We need to do more research so that we can understand what's happening," she adds.

A good start might be training flight attendants to recognize the telltale signs of in-flight rage, says Los Angeles psychologist William Glasser.

"Air rage doesn't begin with rage - it starts with irritation," he says "Flight attendants need to be as sensitive as they can to spotting problem passengers. Once the rage starts, everything gets out of control. You have to stop it before it becomes a problem."

Crew members should look for passengers who are trapped in a middle seat - Glasser says they're the most susceptible to losing their cool - or travelers who are cramped because the person in front of them leaned their seat back.

"One of these raging people could take a plane down," he warns. What is it going to take for the U.S. airline industry to abandon its flawed "wait and see" approach? Do we really need to see a plane brought down over a populated area by an angry passenger as a wake-up call? Let's hope not.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.