With reports of disturbingly ill-behaved airplane passengers becoming more and more frequent since the start of the COVID pandemic, one major airline is once again sounding the horn for a national no-fly list comprised of passengers who are dangerously disruptive.
Delta Air Lines CEO Edward Bastian went straight to the top with his concerns, writing a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland outlining his request for coordination in creating the no-fly list.
“In addition to the welcome increase in enforcement and prosecutions, we are requesting you support our efforts with respect to the much-needed step of putting any person convicted of an on-board disruption on a national, comprehensive, unruly passenger "no-fly" list that would bar that person from traveling on any commercial air carrier,” Bastian wrote in the letter according to NPR, who obtained a copy.
The request, though, has raised the antennae of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has fought a number of battles in court against the federal government over the TSA’s no-fly list for suspected terrorists. The organization says many innocent people were placed on that list with no additional information as to why they were listed… and with no instructions on how to get off the list.
“Generally, we think it's a bad idea,” Jay Stanley, an ACLU senior policy analyst, told NPR. “If somebody is a casual flier who only flies once or twice a year for a family vacation, then this punishment of not being able to fly would not amount to much. On the other hand, if you're in sales or some other position where your job depends on being able to fly every week, it could be an enormously significant punishment.”
However, aside from coordinating with other airlines on a broader level, a company-specific no-fly list is not only legal, it’s already standard practice. Delta has about 1,900 people on a no-fly list for refusal to follow the airline’s requirements on masking… not a surprise since mask mandates seem to have a direct correlation with the abnormal spike in unruly passengers.
Of the 5,981 reports on unruly passengers collected by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2021, 4,290 were incidents that involved mask mandates, and that fact makes the ACLU even more reticent to acquiesce to a new no-fly list.
“[These incidents] may go back to normal levels when this is over,” Stanley said. “And yet we'll have this infrastructure for creating this punishment that will long outlast the current circumstances, and that has the potential to create real unfairnesses for people if it's not done just right.”
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