NEARLY every day new stories hit the headlines about misbehaving flyers who get drunk on flights, turn violent or try to bring weapons or unusual animals on board. But it is not just the behaviour of passengers that now appears on a downward slide, but that of crew as well.
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Last week videos were posted to Weibo, a Chinese social-media platform, that appeared to show an orgy of at least six people in a hotel room. Reports followed that the participants were flight attendants for China Eastern Airlines, a Chinese flag-carrier, or possibly its subsidiary Shanghai Airlines. In a statement apparently issued by the company, it denied that its flight attendants were involved and suggested that the creators of the video were seeking to damage its reputation. According to Newsweek, an American magazine, the Chinese authorities then removed most coverage of the incident published by local media outlets from the internet.
If the details of this episode remain hazy, a flood of similar reports of crew misbehaviour in the last few days seem to establish a pattern. On March 24th a very drunk pilot had to be removed from the cockpit of a TAP Air Portugal aircraft, with passengers then forced to wait another two days for a replacement flight. On March 23rd news reports said that a British Airways (BA) crew member had been arrested on suspicion of raping one of his colleagues after an off-duty drinks party during a layover in Singapore.
These incidents follow a long line of public-relations disasters for the airlines concerned. Last week Graham McTavish, a Scottish actor, tweeted that he had heard United Airlines flight attendants joking about killing dogs in the overhead compartment, shortly after a French bulldog died after it was placed in the overhead bin on another United flight. (The airline says it is investigating Mr McTavish’s allegation.) In September BA launched an investigation after video showed a woman wearing its cabin-crew uniform ranting about Nigerians and the size of their private parts in a manner widely seen as racist and sexist. Three months later, the same airline fired three of its cabin crew for wild drunken behaviour during a stopover in Nairobi. Paddle Your Own Kanoo, an aviation-news site, has documented several other recent episodes of alleged transgressions by BA staff during drink-filled parties, involving killing fish, running across a hotel lobby naked and urinating in public.
What is going on here? Have flight attendants really gone wild? In fact, there is probably a much simpler explanation. Travellers have got into the habit of whipping out their smartphones to shoot video whenever something noteworthy starts to occur, or to tweet about it. Or, in the case of the rant about Nigerians recorded by the woman in the BA uniform, when something like this emerges, it spreads like wildfire on social media. None of these things happened routinely ten years ago.
There are around 40m commercial flights around the world every year, around twice the number of a decade ago. It is hardly a surprise that the crew on a handful of these will do something problematic. Pilots and flight attendants have always liked a drink off-duty. What is new is that the world learns about these incidents—and quickly.