Even if you haven’t flown the ‘friendly skies’ lately, you’ve heard of some of the wild altercations aboard flights.
In fact, according to a recent survey, one in five flight attendants had been in a ‘physical altercation’ with an unruly passenger this year alone.
Even as passengers have been arrested and put on no-fly lists, violence on planes keeps happening.
So now flight attendants are pushing for self-defense training (which, when we did a deeper dive, we discovered they’ve been asking for since 9/11).
Thanks to a provision in a Senate aviation bill, it looks like this is going to happen. The TSA had offered a self-defense course for flight attendants and pilots, but it was paused due to the pandemic and is now back on.
According to the TSA, more than 29,000 flight crew members have already taken the training.
As a passenger, if someone threatens a flight attendant we hope they have the skill set to take them down. And if they need help, other passengers step in to restrain the idiot threat.