Unruly behaviour could leave you grounded for life

Misbehaving on a domestic flight could get a passenger banned from flying the airline for three months to two years.

And if the government’s plans to control unruly behaviour by passengers on domestic flights take off, then the process of identifying the first such passenger could start by end-June this year.

Briefing newspersons on the proposed national no-fly list, RN Choubey, Secretary, Civil Aviation, said passengers could be banned from taking a flight for up to two years or even further, indicating that such passengers might never be able to fly again.

The Ministry is proposing to categorise unruly passengers into three levels. Level I will have passengers indulging in disruptive behaviour, such as making physical gestures, verbal harassment, and unruly inebriation.

In level II are passengers indulging in physical abuse such as pushing, kicking, hitting grabbing, and inappropriate touching or sexual harassment. Those indulging in life-threatening behaviour like damage to aircraft operating system, physical violence such as choking, eye gouging, murderous assault on the flight crew, among others, will be slotted under level III. The punishment for this could be a ban on flying with the airline on which the act has been committed for at least two years.

In addition, if security agencies put any passenger’s name on a no-fly list he/she too will be banned from boarding an aircraft, Choubey said.

These are among the suggestions which have been proposed in the draft Civil Aviation Requirement (CAR) to contain unruly passengers. The CAR has now been made public for suggestions.

Following this, the government will work on creating a no-fly list, Choubey said, adding that he hoped to have the list in place by June-end.

The draft proposes that if a passenger is banned by one airline then it will be left to other domestic airlines to decide whether they want to fly such a passenger or not. While the ban is proposed only on domestic airlines, Choubey said there was nothing to stop foreign airlines from implementing India’s no-fly list if the Rights of Carriage Act of the international airline’s also has similar provisions.

To implement the no-fly list, the government is also looking to see how it can link a passenger making a domestic airline booking to a common identity, be it passport or Aadhaar. The draft provides for a two-tier complaint-handling mechanism, which includes the initial inquiry at the airline level by an internal committee headed by a retired District and Sessions Judge and an appeal at the government level headed by a retired Judge of a High Court.

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