A new cross-airline ban of a blacklist of problem passengers could also hand airlines a weapon against ordinary travelers.
If you find yourself on a blacklist of problem passengers, you can usually walk over to a competitor’s counter and buy a ticket on another flight.
The Department for Transport and the Home Office are reportedly working on a national system that would let U.K. airlines share details of serious offenders. A person barred by one carrier could be flagged at check-in by another.
The trade group Airlines U.K. has welcomed the idea. They called a national ban list an important next step for the most serious cases. The budget carrier Jet2 has been lobbying for a blacklist, saying a database would mean a passenger banned from its flights could be banned from other U.K. airlines, too.
The timing isn’t an accident
Bad passenger behavior spikes during summer travel, and the proposal landed right as the season got under way. A government source told the BBC that everyone should be able to enjoy a pint at the airport, but that antisocial behavior on flights threatens the safety of passengers and crew.
The U.S. has been chasing a version of this for years without success. The Protection from Abusive Passengers Act, reintroduced by Sen. Jack Reed, Rep. Eric Swalwell and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, would direct the TSA to create and manage a program barring passengers fined or convicted for assaulting or intimidating crew or other travelers.
The bill ties a listing to a fine or a conviction and it builds in an appeal and a process for removing people added in error. It has been introduced repeatedly since 2022 but hasn’t passed.
Is this really a problem?
There is one small problem with a blacklist of problem passengers. Despite recent headlines — I’ll get to those in a minute — the numbers behind all this are coming down, not going up.
The FAA’s zero-tolerance policy, in place since January 2021, helped cut the incident rate by more than 80 percent from the early-2021 peak of 5,973 reported cases, mostly related to the pandemic and masking requirements. Airlines reported 2,102 cases in 2024 and 2,076 in 2023. As of late September 2025, the FAA had logged 1,205 reports for the year. (It hasn’t published any numbers since then.)
Globally, the International Air Transport Association reported the rate improved to one incident every 355 flights in 2025, compared to one every 307 in 2024. The FAA itself notes that reporting is at the crew’s discretion, so the real count is fuzzier than any single figure suggests.
Interestingly, the FAA doesn’t have authority over no-fly lists. In the U.S., that power sits with TSA and national security agencies, which is why a real blacklist needs an act of Congress.
What the airline industry claims
Airlines and unions claim a small number of repeat offenders cause a large share of the serious incidents and current bans are too easy to dodge, so a shared list is the missing tool.
The Transport Workers Union has backed the U.S. bill on the grounds that a worker who assaults a colleague faces consequences, so a passenger who assaults a flight attendant should too. The carriers frame it as protecting the majority from a tiny minority.
What should we do?
We’ve already seen several high-profile unruly passenger incidents this summer travel season — the kind that turn a routine flight into an emergency for everyone.
- A United flight had to turn around because a passenger made multiple attempts to breach the cockpit. United Flight 2005 from Chicago to Minneapolis diverted on May 30 to Madison, Wis., after a man repeatedly tried to get into the flight deck. Crew and off-duty officers restrained him, and the FBI arrested him on landing.
- A Frontier flight had to turn around because a passenger tried to open an exit door. He later went after a flight attendant. Frontier Flight 3345 to Chicago diverted to Miami on June 3. A passenger attempted to open an emergency exit. Then he moved toward the cockpit, and attacked a crew member. Law enforcement took him into custody before the flight continued.
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Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers consumers to solve their problems and helps those who can’t. He’s the author of numerous books on consumer advocacy and writes three nationally syndicated columns. He also publishes the Elliott Report, a news site for consumers, and Elliott Confidential, a critically acclaimed newsletter about customer service. If you have a consumer problem you can’t solve, contact him directly through his advocacy website. You can also follow him on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or sign up for his daily newsletter.
