Unruly passengers were a problem before the pandemic. Now they’re even worse

Passenger Philip Baum recently experienced one of the most uncomfortable flights of his life.

To Baum, it was obvious his seatmate, a stranger, was drunk. Flight crew, he says, “denied him alcohol.”

“But in front of me, he managed to sneak more alcohol off the trolley,” Baum recalls.

For Baum, who was seated in the economy cabin, being in such close proximity to the “unruly” passenger for multiple hours wasn’t pleasant.

“I actually thought I’d throw up,” he tells CNN Travel. “The guy pulled out his nails. He was bleeding. He stank, and he was blind drunk.”

Moreover, Baum was worried the passenger, who didn’t seem fully in control, “was going to completely lose it” at any moment.

“In the end, I spent about four hours talking to him and calming him down,” Baum recalls.

Throughout the flight, Baum felt himself working hard to control his own reaction to the situation. He felt, at several points, on the precipice of giving in to his own anger and frustration.

“The only reason I didn’t become unruly was because I thought, ‘Philip, you know better. You can’t suddenly become unruly,’” he says.

Baum is an aviation security expert, the founder of DISPAX World, the international conference on Unruly Airline Passenger Management and Restraint.