The US is considering creating a no-fly list after a year of unruly passengers on flights.
Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines has been pressuring the Biden administration for months to create a federal "no-fly" list that would bar all airline passengers convicted of unruly behavior from flying. In February, Delta CEO Ed Bastian wrote a letter to the US Attorney General.
He told Good Morning America that actions have consequences.
He said that any individual that gets in the way of customer and employee safety needs to be addressed at the highest possible level.
In September, Delta asked other airlines to share their list of passengers who have been banned from flying due to the Pandemic.
The airlines, the Airlines for America trade group, and US government entities have held meetings in recent months about the possibility of implementing the list system, but no agreements have yet been reached.
According to the report, Delta has added nearly 1,900 names to its internal no-fly list for mask-related incidents and has sent 900 of those names to the Transportation Security Administration for potential civil penalties.
The FAA received over 6000 unruly passenger reports in 2021, with over 4,000 of them relating to mask requirements. The question is how the list would be implemented.
Henry Harteveldt, travel analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group, told Insider that the process would be long but doable.
He said that there are a lot of parties involved and a lot of scenarios to consider.
The government has to determine what behavior qualifies as unruly.
They need to build in safeguards so that a passenger who may just be rude, or perhaps did not hear, doesn't get on the plane.
How long people are on the no-fly list is one of the factors the government will need to think about.
Harteveldt said the biggest impact is peace of mind when flying.
He said that when you get on an airplane, you shouldn't feel like you have to be in a wrestling contest.
The creation of a national no-fly list is complicated and getting opposition from Republican lawmakers. The Justice Department was pressured to block the list by eight GOP senators. The recent increase in unruly behavior is mask related, so it would be unfair to punish those individuals.
They argued that a flight ban is excessive because the no-fly list used to be limited to terror suspects.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union, told NPR that a no-fly list is a bad idea, but not for the same reason. The organization sued the US government in 2016 for putting people on the terrorist no-fly list without a way to remove them.
He said that their experience with government watch lists and ban lists was not good.
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