Is it time for an international blacklist of problem passengers?

If you get yourself banned by an airline for screaming at a flight attendant or trying to open a door at altitude, you can usually walk over to a competitor’s counter and buy a ticket.

Britain wants to put an end to that, and its actions may ripple across the Atlantic.

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, so a person barred by one carrier could be flagged at check-in by another.

The trade group Airlines U.K. has welcomed the idea and 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 underway. 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?

One small problem: 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 and went after a flight attendant. Frontier Flight 3345 to Chicago diverted to Miami on June 3 after a passenger attempted to open an emergency exit, moved toward the cockpit, and attacked a crew member. Law enforcement took him into custody before the flight continued.

So here’s what I’d like to know:

And a few follow-up questions:

My take

I have a few questions: Who decides who belongs on an airline blacklist? What counts as “unruly,” when that word stretches from a drunk yelling at a gate agent to someone who threatens a crew member with violence? If an airline flags you and you think it’s wrong, who do you appeal to, how long does it take to resolve, and can you travel in the meantime?

The U.K. plan leaves the boarding decision with individual airlines, which means a person could be cleared by one carrier and refused by another reading the same flag. That’s not really a standard.

Now think about who controls the entry. If an airline can add a name on its own say-so, the list stops being about safety and becomes leverage. Win a credit card dispute against a carrier and watch it decide you’re a problem passenger. Demand the refund you’re owed, complain too loudly about a canceled flight, post the wrong thing about an airline online. None of that threatens anyone at 35,000 feet, but all of it could land your name in a database that follows you to every gate in the country if the people building it don’t draw a hard line around what qualifies. The incentive to misuse a shared ban list is baked in.

The U.S. bill at least gets this part right on paper. It writes appeal and error correction into the text, and it ties the list to a fine or a conviction rather than an airline’s mood. The British version, so far, is a meeting agenda. Get the guardrails wrong and you don’t have a safety tool-you have a system where a billing fight or a bad review can quietly cost someone access to every airline in the country, with no clear way to fight it.

Your turn

Have you been on a flight that got ugly, or watched a passenger get hauled off? Or have you ever felt an airline treat you like a problem for doing nothing more than disputing a charge? Tell me where you land in this debate.

Elliott Report

This story was originally published June 6, 2026 at 6:00 AM.