A man who refused to wear a mask on a Southwest Airlines flight out of Oakland earlier this year faces a $9,000 fine, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday in a statement.
The man was on a plane bound for Houston on Feb. 20 when a crew member asked him to pull up his face mask to cover his nose. The passenger allegedly refused and the flight attendant gave him a new mask that he threw onto the ground.
The flight attendant explained that masks are required on airplanes by the Centers for Disease Control and the Transportation Security Administration and asked the passenger to acknowledge what she was saying, according to the statement.
The man continued to refuse to comply and asserted that face-mask wearing would not be enforced in Texas.
The cabin crew alerted the captain of the incident and the captain arranged for police to meet the plane upon arrival in Houston.
The FAA said in the May 24 statement that it's proposing civil penalties ranging from $9,000 to $15,000 against four other passengers for misconduct. In the most extreme incident, a female passenger on a Feb. 22 JetBlue flight from Miami to Los Angeles seated in the main cabin followed a male crew member into the first class section where she assaulted him, hitting him with her body and nearly pushing him into the lavatory.
"The enforcement actions announced today are part of the FAA’s zero-tolerance policy for unruly and dangerous behavior by passengers," the FAA said.
The FAA has seen an alarming increase in passenger misconduct amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and since Jan. 1, the agency has received about 2,500 reports of unruly behavior by passengers, including about 1,900 reports of passengers refusing to comply with the federal facemask mandate. This compares to the typical 100 to 150 formal cases of bad behavior from passengers the agency sees in a typical year, according to NBC News.