Michael here. Travelers need to calm down.

On Wednesday, a pilot on Frontier flight 124 out of Montego Bay radioed ahead for law enforcement to meet the plane in Atlanta, because a passenger had threatened to stab the people around her. The flight landed safely. Three days before that, a different Frontier flight diverted to Miami after a man tried to open the exit doors mid-air, rammed the cockpit with his shoulder, and choked an off-duty flight attendant. Both happened in the last stretch of a year in which U.S. airlines have already reported more than 640 unruly-passenger incidents — and we're not halfway through it.

That's the backdrop. Now the actual question.

We keep trying to measure how rude America has gotten, and we keep failing. Every few months there's a new study, a new index, a new think-tank chart with a confident downward line. Civility is collapsing. Civility is fine, actually. It's the phones. It's politics. It's the economy. It's that nobody says "good morning" anymore. The data never agrees with itself, because the thing it's trying to count — the felt temperature of public life — doesn't sit still long enough to be counted.

So here's a different approach. Skip the index. Find the person in America who absorbs the most strangers per day, in the most confined space, under the most rules, with the least ability to walk away, and ask them.

That person is handing you a Coke at 35,000 feet.

Most incivility statistics are soft. This one isn't. In 2019, the FAA logged 1,161 reports of unruly passengers. In 2021, it logged nearly 6,000 — a 492% jump over the prior year, and roughly five times the 2019 figure. That is not a vibe. That is a federal agency, counting a specific thing, watching it quintuple.

The number has come down since. About 2,400 in 2022, roughly 2,100 in 2023 and again in 2024. As of this spring, more than 640 incidents are already on the books for 2026. The FAA likes to say the rate is down more than 80% from the early-2021 peak, and that's true. But "down from the worst year ever recorded" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. Reports today are still running at nearly double the pre-pandemic baseline, and they've stopped falling. The crisis crested. The new normal did not return to the old normal. It just stopped getting worse, at a level we would have called alarming in 2018.

A useful way to hold both facts at once: the fever broke, but the patient's resting temperature is now higher.

There's a reason the airplane catches the heat before the rest of the country feels it, and it isn't that flyers are uniquely awful people. It's that the cabin is a machine for concentrating every pressure that makes a person snap, then removing every exit.

Start with the obvious accelerants. Alcohol, served and smuggled. Delays with no explanation. A boarding process that asks strangers to negotiate overhead bin space like it's a closing argument. Then add the part that's easy to forget: a flight is one of the last places in American life where you are subject to non-negotiable rules enforced by a person who is paid to be nice to you. You can't storm out. You can't take your business elsewhere mid-air. The only available target for your frustration is the person in the aisle, and they are required by federal law to keep their composure while you lose yours.

The 2021 spike made this legible because it had a clean trigger. Roughly 72% of that year's incidents were mask-related — passengers who had decided that a piece of cloth was a hill worth screaming on. That's the part everyone remembers. But masks were the match, not the room. When the mandate ended, the fights didn't end with it. They just lost their slogan. The underlying combustibility — short tempers, long days, cheap liquor, and a captive audience — was already there. It still is.

During the pandemic, America built a whole vocabulary around the "frontline worker." Nurses. Grocery clerks. Delivery drivers. We clapped for them from balconies. The flight attendant somehow never made the list, which is strange, because by their own union's accounting they were getting hit more than almost anyone we did put on a poster.

In a 2021 survey of nearly 5,000 flight attendants, 85% said they'd dealt with an unruly passenger that year. More than half had handled at least five. And 17% — call it one in six — reported a physical incident. Punched, kicked, spit on, grabbed. The union's president, a flight attendant of two decades, put it plainly in congressional testimony: this used to be rare, and now it's a category.

Whether flight attendants are literally the most-assaulted American workforce per capita is the kind of claim that's hard to certify, because no one keeps a clean national leaderboard of who gets hit at work. But the spirit of it survives scrutiny. Here is a job that is mostly hospitality — drinks, blankets, where's-my-bag — and is also, increasingly, hazard duty.

The same person who demonstrates the seatbelt is the one expected to physically separate two grown adults over a reclined seat, then file the report, then smile through the beverage cart on the next leg. We trained them for evacuations and water landings. We did not train most of them to be the de facto bouncer of the national mood.

And they are not alone — they're just the most extreme version of something happening to everyone who works a counter. Christine Porath, the Georgetown professor who has spent two decades studying workplace incivility, surveyed people across more than two dozen industries and found that 73% now say it's not unusual for customers to behave badly, up from 61% a decade earlier. Roughly one in five American workers reports being abused or harassed on the job, often by the customer they're serving. The flight attendant is the same story as the nurse, the gate agent, the barista, and the school-board clerk — the same rising tide, just measured in a metal tube at 35,000 feet where the customer can't leave and neither can the worker.

Porath has a line that does more work than any chart: rudeness, she says, is like the common cold — it's contagious, it spreads fast, anyone can be a carrier, and getting infected doesn't take much. Her research found that incivility doesn't stay between two people. It ripples to witnesses, who then become ruder themselves, three degrees out. One sharp exchange at the boarding door doesn't end at the boarding door. It seeds the next one.

Now picture the ideal environment to spread that particular virus. Confined. Delayed. Crowded. Everyone already stressed, many already drinking, all of them subject to rules they didn't write and can't negotiate, watching each other for signs of who's going to lose it first. If you wanted to engineer a chamber to incubate and amplify American rudeness, you would build a narrowbody jet and fill it with people who've just spent two hours in a security line.

The broader data backs this up. SHRM, the human-resources association, runs a quarterly Civility Index, and by the end of 2024 it was clocking record highs — U.S. workers collectively experiencing or witnessing more than 200 million uncivil acts per day, at a productivity cost it pegged north of $2.7 billion daily.

SHRM's own analysts blamed the surge on a familiar stack: socio-political tension, lingering pandemic stress, and what one of them called "digital bravery" — the keyboard-warrior reflex of saying things online you'd never say to someone's face, now leaking back into the physical world. The cabin is where the online disinhibition meets a person who is physically present, can't be muted, and is holding your drink.

And underneath it all is the polarization. Pew found that the share of each party calling the other side "more immoral" than other Americans roughly doubled in six years — from 47% of Republicans and 35% of Democrats in 2016 to 72% and 63% by 2022.

You can argue about cause and effect, but you cannot wave away the timing: the mask fights that drove 72% of 2021's cabin incidents weren't really about masks. They were about which tribe a piece of cloth signaled, playing out in the one room where strangers from both tribes are belted in side by side with nowhere to go.

The seriousness of the shift shows in who got involved. This stopped being an airline customer-service problem and became a federal-law-enforcement one.

The FAA can't put you in handcuffs — it does civil penalties, fines that have climbed into tens of thousands of dollars per incident. But in late 2021 it built a referral pipeline to the FBI for the cases that cross from "rude" into "crime": assaulting crew, threatening the cabin, trying to breach the flight deck. The Justice Department told federal prosecutors to prioritize them. Hundreds of cases have been referred for criminal review since.

And then there's the no-fly question, which is where the politics get genuinely unresolved. Airlines keep their own internal ban lists, but those don't travel between carriers — get banned by one, buy a ticket on another. The fix everyone reaches for is a national list: one blacklist, all airlines, you assault a crew member and you're grounded everywhere. Unions want it. Some lawmakers have drafted it.

Civil-liberties groups and passenger-rights advocates have planted a flag against it, and their objection isn't frivolous: a federal travel ban with vague standards and thin due process is the kind of tool that's easy to expand and hard to appeal. Notably, the FAA itself says unruly passengers are not added to the TSA No Fly List — that list is for terrorism, and the line between "dangerous on a plane" and "national security threat" is one people are reasonably afraid to blur.

So the country is stuck in a familiar shape: fragmented private bans that are too weak, a centralized public ban that might be too risky, and no agreed-upon middle.

Case in point — and it's the Miami diversion from the top of this piece, worth telling in full. The man who tried to open the exit doors on that San Juan-to-Chicago flight didn't stop there. A flight attendant walked him back. He shoulder-rammed the cockpit door. A flight attendant walked him back again. He asked to use the lavatory, and urinated on the floor of it. He was moved to a new seat, where an off-duty flight attendant volunteered to sit across the aisle and keep an eye on him — and when that off-duty attendant reached across to grab a bag, the passenger put him in a chokehold.

He had to be restrained by other passengers, one of them a former MMA fighter and jiu-jitsu black belt who happened to be sitting nearby, for the better part of half an hour until the plane could get on the ground. The FBI took custody in Miami. His current charge: misdemeanor battery. His bond: $20,000. So the rundown is: attempted to breach the doors at altitude, attempted to breach the flight deck, and choked a crew member, and the system's opening offer is the same charge you'd get for shoving someone in a parking lot. Seriously??!

The strangest turn is what happened off the plane. A cohort of working flight attendants picked up their phones and became, in effect, America's incivility correspondents. They post the breakdowns. They explain the unwritten rules — why you don't hand them your trash mid-safety-demo, why the galley isn't a lounge, what "we're number three for takeoff" actually means. They narrate the absurd and decode the etiquette, half stand-up, half public-service announcement, to audiences in the millions.

It would be easy to file this as content. It's more interesting as evidence. When the workforce that absorbs the most public friction in America starts producing a steady stream of field notes about that friction, you're watching a kind of folk anthropology — the people closest to the problem, documenting it in real time because no official index will. The flight attendant on TikTok explaining how to behave on a plane is doing the job the civility studies can't: telling you, with receipts, exactly which social contract has frayed and where.

Here's the uncomfortable thing about everything we've built to solve this. The zero-tolerance policy, the $37,000 fines, the FBI referrals, the no-fly proposals — every tool in the kit is a punishment. We have gotten very good at raising the cost of the worst behavior after it happens. We have done almost nothing to lower the temperature before it does.

And punishment has a ceiling. Fines deter the calculating; they do nothing for the drunk, the dysregulated, or the genuinely enraged, which is most of the people actually causing incidents. You cannot fine your way to a civil cabin any more than you can jail your way to a civil country. Enforcement is a tourniquet. It stops the worst bleeding. It does not make the patient healthy.

Start with what the research already shows. Porath's central finding is that civility, like incivility, is contagious — it ripples the same three degrees, just in the other direction. One person who stays warm under pressure resets the room. That's not a greeting-card sentiment; it's measured. Which means the highest-leverage intervention isn't a new penalty.

It's the upstream stuff that keeps the first spark from catching: telling people the truth about a delay instead of letting them stew in silence, staffing the gate so a frustrated passenger has someone to talk to before they board angry, training the people on the ground — gate agents, not just crew — to de-escalate, because half of cabin incidents are visible before the door ever closes. The flight attendants have been saying this for years. Catch it on the jet bridge and it never becomes a diversion over Wisconsin.

But the honest answer goes past the airport, and it's less satisfying than a policy. The cabin is downstream of the culture. You cannot fix in row 14 what the country broke on the timeline. If 73% of frontline workers now expect customers to behave badly, if we're generating 200 million uncivil acts a day, if the most reliable predictor of an in-flight fight in 2021 was which side of a political line a passenger stood on — then the airplane is not the disease. It's the diagnostic.

The work of getting civility back is the unglamorous, un-legislatable work of being a little more decent in the small moments, because those ripple too. The person who treats the gate agent like a human being is, measurably, lowering the odds of the incident three rows back.

That's the part no agency can mandate and no fine can buy. Enforcement is what we do because it's what we can do. Decency is what would actually work, and it's the one thing that can't be ordered from the top.

Here's where it lands. We don't have a trustworthy national instrument for rudeness. We have competing surveys and partisan hand-waving and the general sense, shared across the political spectrum, that something has gone off. What we do have is a single occupation that sits at the exact intersection of confinement, rules, alcohol, exhaustion, and strangers — and a federal agency that's been counting what happens there since 1995.

That count went up fivefold, came partway down, and parked itself at roughly double where it started. The fever broke. The baseline didn't.

If you want to know how rude America actually got, you can wait for the next index. Or you can ask the person handing you a Coke at 35,000 feet. They've been keeping score the whole time.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine, writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he focused on building permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com

Email: [email protected]

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