Airline pilot here (but not for United) …
Unlike my usual essay format, here are a series of disconnected thought-bites:
We (95+%) aren’t cops. A few folks are reserve cops or have cop-like attitudes. Many are former military officers. None are fond of anarchic or childish behavior. We’re selected and rewarded for being hyper-rational and hyper-mature. At least while at work.
We want to get where we’re scheduled to go as close to on time as we can. We are charged with the safety of everybody uppermost. We are aware that some passengers sometimes misbehave in non-dangerous ways. We’re aware that some flight attendants (hereafter “FA”) are better at escalating situations than calming them; at least on certain days under certain provocations. Other FAs, the vast majority, are truly amazing at sponging up negative energy & calming the un-calmable.
Drunks come in two kinds: get sleepy & get aggressive. Altitude & the closed-in stress of flight both exacerbate whichever tendency a person has. Drug users are similar if less predictable. Insane folks are wholly unpredictable. Anger management issues are far more common in the general populace than civilized folks might expect.
TSA is responsible for physical perimeter security. i.e. keeping bad guys & bad stuff outside of the sterile area. Period. Nationwide, TSA catches about 30 firearms in carryons every **week **and many dozen serious non-firearm weapons. See Blog | Transportation Security Administration for more interesting facts.
Any misbehavior in the airport or aboard an aircraft is not TSA jurisdiction. It falls to the local police on the ground and the FBI in flight. At a major hub airport the local PD arrests or escorts off premises about a dozen drunk / drugged / anger management cases per day. The US has roughly 20 hub airports.
Federal regulations and the airline’s contract of carriage require civilized behavior & compliance with crew members’ safety-related instructions. Failure to comply means no transportation need be provided.
We’re aware that true bad actors may use minor provocations to gauge the security tenor of the crew du jour. Or to learn about response protocols for use on some future attack. True bad actors are still targeting civil aviation and will be doing so for the foreseeable future.
Returning to the gate is not done lightly. It creates a whole cascade of bad consequences for us as individual workers as well as for all-but-one of our customers.
Captains make the decision. But since they can’t see the situation first hand, they have to rely on the input from the FA crew. Ideally getting input from more than one FA. FAs are trained in conflict resolution tactics & to make dispassionate decisions & reports. Which training often, but not always, works well. Their original & refresher training also includes specific information about folks bringing large outside stresses, e.g. traveling to a funeral, into the mix.
Worst case, bad guys on the ground can’t do much harm. Maybe punch a few noses or if they’re Jackie Chan, kill somebody. Absolute insane worst case we shut down and evacuate.
In the air the same situation can lead to the loss of a $100+ million aircraft, a billion dollars in liability, the death of a couple hundred people aboard the aircraft, and who-knows-what destroyed & killed on the ground. Whatever you do for a living, you probably don’t make decisions with consequences like this every day. We do. Conservative decision-making is highly desirable when the stakes are that large. We are strongly encouraged to not have a passenger problem still festering at takeoff. Either it’s adequately defused, or the passenger is removed before we launch.
As an industry we spend billions a year to shave another thousandth of a percentage point off the risk of an accident. And our customers demand that of us. Which we like too because we intend to retire *from *work, not die *at *work. To ignore a passenger-caused risk which is 10s or hundreds of times greater than that seems kinda shortsighted.
In the course of a typical work month my FAs defuse a dozen very angry passengers. And calm uncounted other annoyed or nervous ones. In the course of a year I refuse to carry about 1 passenger. In 25 years I have yet to return to the gate or divert to deal with an unruly passenger. But tomorrow may be the day.
While you are back there I am responsible for your life. I can kill you with a well-timed flick of the wrist. Or through neglect or inattention or sloppy decision-making. We work very hard to control all the controllable risks (e.g. mechanical failure, poor execution) and to mitigate the uncontrollable ones (e.g. weather). Human misbehavior whether due to ignorance, irrationality, or malice is a bigger wild card than either of the above. And as such deserves to be given a wider berth than does, say weather.
