Air passengers are more likely to become unruly during the holidays. The data proves it

For many, transmit move around during the holidays only if conjures up feelings of dread. You're at the mercy of unpredictable canadian river overwinter weather. You’re travelling with extra luggage filled with gifts that may not arrive at your destination on time. And on top of it all, you likely paid dearly for the ticket.

It turns out that all that anxiety and stress leads to a spike in unruly behaviour in the skies.

December sees the highest proportion of disruptive passenger reports, based on approximately 2,400 reports filed since the year 2000. This shows the increase isn't just because there are more flights — but because unruly incidents are actually more common this time of year.

December can be a uniquely intense time of year to be a passenger, says Alia Hussain, who has been working as cabin crew member for 18 years. She is also the president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees' airline division, representing WestJet, Encore and Swoop cabin crew.

Full flights, tight connections and weather delays all conspire to create high-pressure situations, she said. It's also challenging for crew members, who are charged with keeping things calm at 30,000 feet.

“We work irregular hours, face challenging operating conditions … and often experience consecutive minimum-rest duty days,” said Hussain. “The combination creates a far more intense environment than a typical travel month, for both the passengers and crew.”

A disruptive passenger report is filed whenever someone “disrupts or threatens the normal operations of an aircraft,” according to Transport Canada. Reports are wide ranging and include issues like passengers failing to put their seat upright during landing, smoking in the washroom, being intoxicated, yelling and even sexual assault.

Just last year, on a Christmas Day flight from London, England, to Calgary, a person had “touched and made inappropriate advances toward another passenger,” an incident report stated. “The crew advised [that] the disruptive passenger was very aggressive and vulgar.” The report said the event led to charges.

The data suggests that not only do these types of complaints peak around the holidays, Christmas Day itself has the highest proportion of disruptive passengers of any day in December.

The data comes from Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System, created to log irregularities in Canadian airspace — think bird strikes or miscommunication with air traffic controllers. Transport Canada collects and publishes initial details on these events involving any aircraft registered in Canada.

Putting the holiday spike aside, data suggests that problematic passenger incidents are declining overall. In 2022, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Transport Canada received 224 reports, by far the worst year on record, driven at least in part by mask-related incidents. Last year, there were 176 overall reports.

But we’re certainly not back to pre-pandemic levels.

“We continue to see more passengers with elevated stress levels, lower tolerance for delays or service limitations and a greater willingness to challenge safety instructions in general,” Hussain said. Add to that the increased video recording of interactions and everything becomes even more tense, she added.

Air Canada, however, suggested such cases aboard its flights have remained stable and noted they are rare in relation to its number of flights each year.

The trend of troublesome passengers actually started years before the pandemic, after the Public Safety Act took effect in 2002. Transport Canada credits the legislation with making it easier for airlines to take legal action against disorderly customers.

“Stress, fatigue, [a] sense of entitlement and frustration with travel disruptions play at least as significant a role."

How can we reverse these trends? Hussain says the solution is stronger, system-wide enforcement. She argues that it's not enough for individual airlines to keep no-fly lists; information about problematic passengers must be shared across companies.

Transport Canada highlighted the Passenger Protect Program Operations Centre. This organization works with Public Safety Canada to put security measures in place that restrict travel for high-risk individuals.

Air Canada, WestJet and Porter say they don't implement special protocols for high-stress travel periods or for specific routes.

This isn’t just an issue in Canada. The U.S. Department of Transportation — facing its own rise in in-flight disturbances — released a controversial video campaign ahead of American Thanksgiving urging passengers to be polite, dress appropriately and control their children.

The video begins with a montage of well-dressed passengers from the 1960s, quickly followed by a series of shaky video clips of passengers from the present day, yelling and brawling in the aisles. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy ends the video saying, “The golden age of travel starts with you.”

Methodology

We filtered aircraft information data to include just commercial airplanes.

To get the total monthly proportion of incidents that involved disruptive passengers, we counted the unique CADORS occurrences between 2000 and 2024 by month. We filtered aircraft event data for “disruptive passenger” and counted the number of unique CADORS case numbers between 2000 and 2024 by month. We then divided the number of unique CADORS numbers involving disruptive passengers by total unique occurrences. The same process was used for daily proportion in December and for annual proportions.

To get the number of incidents involving alcohol, we counted the number of unique CADORS cases that had any of the following words in the written summary: alcohol, alcoholic, drinking, liquor, beer, wine, spirits, drunk, drunken, inebriated, intox, intoxicated, impaired, impairment.

Producer, data visualizations and graphics

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