A rowdy airline passenger who’s accused of twice hitting a flight attendant in the face, and also trying to open the door to the cockpit, is facing a $52,500 fine from the Federal Aviation Administration, making it the largest fine handed out by that transportation agency this year.
CBS News writes that the largest fine the FAA can impose is $35,000, but that multiple offenses can bring a fee in excess of that.
The flight in question happened on a Delta airlines trip destined to Seattle, from Honolulu, back on December 23. Also the person facing the substantial penalty is one of four “unruly passengers” that the agency announced on Monday it is looking to get money from under a zero-tolerance policy. They add that the same passenger also wouldn’t comply with instructions from crew members, threatened the flight attendant, and also got out of plastic cuffs that were placed on him (with help from other passengers) during the flight.
Cops were waiting for the passenger when the plane landed.
As for the other three people whose alleged behavior was so bad they’re being charged good amounts of money for it, those include: A woman being fined $9,000 for continually refusing to properly wear a mask and cursing at flight attendants, a passenger being fined $18,500 for bringing his own alcohol onto a JetBlue flight, then refusing to stop drinking it when flight attendants asked him to, and a $27,000 fine being assigned to a passenger who claimed he had a bomb and threatened to kill someone. That latter instance resulted in the plane, which was heading to Chicago, being diverted to Oklahoma City.
Those people have 30 days to respond.
Earlier in May the FAA said it’d received more than 1,300 reports of bad passengers since just February. “Potential violations” were identified in roughly 370 of those. It added that it’s pursuing 27 enforcement actions.
