Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is leading a push to restore decency on planes, pointing to sharp spikes in unruly behavior, calling for a “Golden Age of Travel for the American people” and urging simple courtesies to make flights less hostile as holiday crowds swell. He cites FAA data showing dramatic increases in outbursts and says a mix of shrinking seats, long lines and pandemic-era confrontations helped fuel the problem while the Department rolls out a campaign to encourage respect. This piece lays out the numbers, the causes Duffy highlights, the human solutions he proposes and the nationwide push the administration is mounting to make flying civil again.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy among the professionally offended last week by that “traveling has become more uncivilized.” The FAA data Duffy points to include a 400% increase in in-flight outbursts, 13,800 reported unruly passenger incidents since 2021, and a doubling last year of unruly events compared with 2019. Those figures frame a problem that anyone who flies knows: more fights, more confrontations, more disruptions.
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As part of the Department of Transportation’s broader effort to usher in a “Golden Age of Travel for the American people” Duffy launched a campaign meant to spark “a nationwide conversation around how we can restore courtesy and class to air travel.” That campaign sits alongside initiatives to repair and beautify key transportation infrastructure, and it aims to make respect and decency part of the travel experience again. The message is straightforward: good manners are not nostalgia, they are a public good worth protecting.
In an interview with Blaze News editor Christopher Bedford, Duffy was plainspoken about causes. “I think it’s a confluence of things that have come together that have caused people, as they get on airplanes, to be less civil to each other,” he said, naming long lines and airlines’ tendency to cram more people into smaller cabins. He also points to data suggesting seats have shrunk while passengers have grown, producing discomfort and tension in the cabin.
That tension, Duffy argues, was amplified during COVID when flight attendants were asked to enforce mask rules and found themselves policing compliance instead of serving passengers. “Did people start kind of acting more like animals because they were treated more like animals?” he asked, putting the pandemic’s social shifts squarely at the heart of a behavioral breakdown. The point is not to punish people for one bad interaction, but to reverse an ongoing cultural slide that makes simple cooperation rarer.
The FAA has referred a range of serious incidents to the FBI, including sexual assaults, attacks on fellow passengers and/or flight staff, instances of inappropriate touching of minor fliers, and incidents where passengers attempted to breach the cockpit. Those are extreme examples that underline why the department is pushing back, but Duffy also calls out everyday rudeness — people putting bare feet on seats, blasting movies without headphones, and other small slights that add up. Addressing both ends of that spectrum is part of the plan.
Duffy wants positive behavior promoted, not just negative behavior punished, and he spelled out a few simple expectations in blunt terms. “I want to have a conversation with America that says, ‘Listen, let’s call our better angels. Let’s all be better when we travel together,'” he said, urging travelers to “Let’s dress more respectfully. Let’s be nicer to one another. Let’s say please and thank you.” He even offered a practical example: if a man sees a woman struggling with an overhead bin, step in and help.
“I think we can be better — better humans, better Americans, better travelers,” the secretary said, and he backed that call with a campaign designed to reshape norms before the busiest travel periods. With TSA volumes already high, the aim is to make civility part of how Americans travel again rather than an afterthought. The administration is betting that clear expectations and a renewed sense of common decency will reduce incidents and make travel smoother for everyone.
The TSA expects a flood of travelers over Thanksgiving, and officials warn the numbers will test the system’s limits. Daily screening volume typically runs around 2.48 million souls and the TSA projects screening more than 17.8 million people from Nov. 25 to Dec. 2, with over 3 million on Sunday alone. “We are projecting that the Sunday after Thanksgiving will be one of the busiest travel days in TSA history,” Adam Stahl said, and the appeal from Duffy is timed to try to keep civility intact when crowds are at their worst.
