This was published 1 year ago
Family kicked off Qantas flight in Bali: How much power do cabin crew really have over passengers?
By Michael Gebicki
The incident posted to Nine News' TikTok channel has been viewed more than 6 million times.
An incident on board a Qantas plane in Bali, that has gone viral on TikTok, highlights issues around passenger behaviour and cabin crew authority on flights.
The video, posted to Nine News' TikTok channel with more than 6 million views so far, begins with the aircraft fully loaded, passengers seated, and a male passenger repeating "Get out of my face" to the Qantas flight's crew manager. There's a break in the video and when it resumes the passenger is telling the manager she's "being rude and disrespectful".
As a prelude to this confrontation, when they were about to board the aircraft, the family with small children were reportedly told they couldn't bring their stroller onboard. The mother was distressed and, according to her husband, in tears. "I'm telling you they were being rude and it's f****** disgusting," he says. "They made her cry and she's crying because they were being rude to her with a newborn baby. Tell them to come apologise, right now."
The manager then says "We're not taking you", and he responds saying "we're not leaving. Bring the police here."
"If there's someone on board who is acting like that on the ground you would never take off with them on board ," says Teri O'Toole, Federal Secretary of the Flight Attendants' Association of Australia, and the family were eventually removed from the flight, which left without them.
Before that happens, the video records the manager saying "It's my cabin" and the passenger responds "It's not your plane." Social media lit up over that, with arguments from both sides contesting the issue of cabin management.
So who has ultimate authority on an aircraft?
O'Toole is in no doubt.
"The cabin crew are in command," she says. "In an aircraft the order is captain, first officer, second officer and cabin crew. That's a Civil Aviation Safety Authority regulation."
CASA's rules state a passenger must not "use language or behaviour that is threatening, abusive or insulting; behave in an offensive or disorderly way, including physical assault, verbal abuse or sexual harassment" or "behave in a disorderly, unruly or disruptive manner". The rules are part of the conditions of carriage.
Dealing with passengers is particularly tough right now. In the USA, the Federal Aviation Administration received 1973 incident reports involving unruly passengers in the first nine months of 2022, about 10 times the number reported in pre-pandemic years. The current year has seen uncontrollable passengers lashed to their seat with duct tape, fights that left aircrew with broken bones, hysterical passengers filmed trying to wrench open emergency exit doors and aircraft diverted and forced to offload misbehaving passengers into police custody.
"In comparison we have very few cases where people have to be taken off aircraft," says O'Toole, but here too, air rage is on the rise. According to an Australian Federal Police warning issued at the beginning of October 2022, in the previous seven months, the AFP responded to 748 incidents relating to public disturbances, intoxication and offensive behaviour at its airports.
The main reason for the rise in bad behaviour is frustration. Airlines that lose bags, delay or cancel flights, marshal flyers into long, shuffling queues and jam them together for hours at a time in packed cabins create tension. Loadings on international flights into and out of Australia are running at close to 100 per cent and it's aboard these long-haul flights where squishy economy-class seating is most likely to cause an eruption. Often it's flight attendants who are in the firing line, and becoming punching bags for unhappy, abusive and violent flyers. Along with evacuations, medical emergencies and security threats, defusing enraged passengers is now part of their basic training.
"The reality is every single day when cabin crew go to work they have been abused for the shortcomings of the airline," says O'Toole. "There's anger and disappointment directed at airlines and it's the cabin crew that have to deal with it. Those Bali flights are incredibly hard work. They leave in the middle of the night but most passengers have been checked out of their hotel since the morning. By the time they get on board they might have been hanging around in the airport for the last 10 hours. The mother in this case has small kids and they're probably tired and irritable and she's having to deal with them and a husband yelling at the cabin crew."
"The other issue that needs to be raised, is it appropriate for people to be filmed in their workplace like that? In this case we see the crew dealing with this confrontation, they're easily identified and that gets posted to social media where their performance is judged. That crew manager's privacy is completely shredded and it's an invasion of privacy. We're saying to Qantas 'stop passengers from filming our crew on board'.
"There needs to be an announcement during the safety demonstration that says the crew are there to keep you safe, you need to respect them, do what they tell you because they're trying to keep you safe and do not abuse our staff. You wouldn't pull out your phone and start filming a waiter in a restaurant or a construction worker on a work site, but that happens all the time to cabin crew. According to the airlines it seems like the welfare of crew is secondary to the happiness of passengers."
See also: Flying cattle class turns us into angry, selfish cows
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