Airlines in the past have argued that the costs of federal security mandates, including additional training, should fall on the government rather than private enterprise. The major U.S. airlines and their main trade group did not comment when asked their positions on the current Senate language.

“The airlines were always loath to pay for it,” said former Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who chaired the House Transportation Committee until early this year and led its aviation panel in 2001. DeFazio is now senior strategic advisor to lobbying firm Summit Strategies, though he has said he has no plans to register as a lobbyist.

He called airline opposition to paid self-defense training “irresponsible,” saying that “giving the training — particularly given the uptick of incidents — could be very, very useful and potentially avoid an incident at some point that could be catastrophic.”

Airlines for America, a trade group representing most major commercial airlines, said in a statement that “safety and security of passengers and employees is the top priority.” The group did not answer directly when asked if it supports or opposes the updated flight crew training requirement as written in the Senate bill.

The group said its members “train their crew members and other frontline employees in de-escalation techniques so that self-defense is used as a last resort,” and noted that its airlines “have partnered” with the Transportation Security Administration in support of an optional self-defense training course “for many years.”

United Airlines declined to comment. Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines directed POLITICO to Airlines For America. Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines did not respond to requests for comment.

Flight attendants want more robust training — and airlines to pay for it

Existing law already requires airlines to train their flight crews, including on self defense. But some flight attendants say the current requirement, as written, allows too much room for interpretation.

For instance, the law says airlines must train flight crews in “appropriate responses to defend oneself” and “situational training exercises regarding various threat conditions.” The Senate bill, S. 1939, would make that language more precise, mandating training to defend against “an edged or contact weapon” and “methods to subdue and restrain an active attacker.”

Unions for flight attendants have been pursuing this kind of mandate for years.

Testifying in 2005 before the Senate Commerce Committee, the Association of Flight Attendants’ then-president, Patricia Friend, said cabin crews hadn’t gotten “appropriate and effective self-defense training at even a basic level, let alone any advanced levels” that would help them deal with weapons like scissors or screwdrivers.

“Such training must be mandatory for all commercial flight attendants and pilots,” she said.

The House’s version of the aviation bill, H.R. 3935, doesn’t go that far: It calls for the creation of a task force “to develop voluntary standards and best practices” for flight crews’ response to unruly passengers, but does not include specific changes to self-defense training. It also would require airlines to provide flight crew who want to participate in TSA training with “a process through which” they can “obtain reasonable accommodations.” There’s no guarantee that the language in the Senate bill will survive an eventual negotiation between the two chambers.

In addition to the existing training requirements, the TSA offers flight crew members a free four-hour advanced training course, but people who want to take advantage of it might have to travel and take time off work.

“It requires a lot of dedication, time and possibly money for flight attendants to actually get to take this training,” Garland said.

Cher Taylor, a flight attendant for a low-cost airline who asked POLITICO not to identify her employer, said she returned to work as Covid’s worst was easing and soon after experienced a racially motivated midair fight between two passengers. She wasn’t harmed, but said the incident inspired her to learn how to defend herself.

“When you think about self defense training, you think about the situations that we’re faced with — even verbal disagreements,” Taylor said in an interview. “It’s difficult, and I honestly feel like flight attendants — we need it.”

Taylor said she’s aware of the TSA training but has had trouble aligning her schedule and location with those classes.

“We can plan to be off, they don’t offer the class. And then the class is offered when we’re all at work,” Taylor said. “So having this [mandated] would mean the world to us, because it would allow time and it would force the airline industry to pay for us to take the training to make sure that we’re equipped with the tools that we need to defend ourselves.”

The issue isn’t just theoretical. Nearly 20 percent of respondents to a 2021 Association of Flight Attendants survey said they had experienced a physical incident with an unruly passenger.

Air rage incidents reached a new high in 2021, when the FAA received nearly 6,000 “unruly passenger” reports, a 492 percent increase from the year before, according to agency data. Though the number dropped by more than half in 2022, the FAA initiated 831 investigations of air rage episodes and 567 “enforcement actions” that year, doling out $8.4 million in fines. Globally, one unruly passenger incident occurred for each 568 flights in 2022, according to the International Air Transport Association.

Though the trend line seems to be flattening, this year has already seen 1,177 reports of unruly passengers on U.S. flights as of Aug. 6, according to FAA data, surpassing totals for every year from 2017 through 2020.

“Ever since Covid and masks, there has been a big uptick in incidents of air rage,” DeFazio said. “And the flight attendants are generally the target, or they’re the ones who are supposed to somehow control it or stop it, and many times passengers are pitching in.”

Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who introduced the Senate’s aviation bill, did not respond to a request for comment on the self-defense provision. But she has pushed the federal government to punish unruly passengers and take other steps to dissuade their behavior.

Commerce ranking member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who chairs the aviation subcommittee, declined to comment on the issue.

A fight since 2001

After hijackers armed with knives and box-cutters launched the deadly terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, lawmakers enacted the bill that created the TSA. The idea of teaching self-defense to flight attendants — the first line of defense against passenger misdeeds — originated in that legislation, which President George W. Bush signed in November 2001. The law established a working group tasked with creating guidelines on security training for flight crew members.

In 2002, Congress created the Homeland Security Department, into which the TSA was folded. Language in that bill directed the TSA to “require both classroom and effective hands-on situational training in specified elements of self-defense.”

That was when the airline industry began to push back, according to the Association of Flight Attendants and a former Senate Commerce Committee staffer involved with those negotiations, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations at the time.

“The airlines were not making any money, and anything that was viewed as spending more money, they weren’t very excited about,” the former staffer said.

In October 2002, as airlines were reeling from the attacks of the prior year, Leo Mullin, then CEO and Chairman of Delta Air Lines, testified about the heavy price the airline industry had paid for federal security mandates, which he said at that time cost the industry roughly $4 billion.

“Four billion dollars is a staggering amount for any industry to absorb — and, indeed, no other private sector has been asked to finance national security costs,” he testified at the time. He added that pending legislation “to arm pilots and provide self-defense training to flight crews could create large new unfunded mandates.”

Delta did not comment on Mullin’s 2002 testimony or its position on the language in the Senate bill, and instead directed POLITICO to Airlines For America.

In 2003, early language in a bill that reauthorized the FAA would have mandated advanced self-defense training, the Association of Flight Attendants’ Garland said. But by the time the bill became law, it had been changed to voluntary.

In 2004, TSA created a free, optional advanced self-defense training course for flight crews. The agency holds it in 24 locations across the United States.

The program has had its critics. Shortly after it was created, a Government Accountability Office report identified “concerns about the training design and delivery, such as the lack of recurrent training and the lack of a realistic training environment,” as well as the absence of performance measures to evaluate the program’s effectiveness.

More than 29,000 flight crew members have taken the training, according to TSA data. From fiscal years 2005 through 2017, annual attendance ranged from about 500 to a maximum of about 1,700 in fiscal 2010. In the 2018 fiscal year, enrollment jumped to nearly 3,000. Enrollment reached all-time records in 2022 and 2023, with more than 4,700 crew members attending the training in fiscal 2023.

A TSA spokesperson said in a statement that the agency has “consistently worked to make” the training “accessible to the crew member community.”

But DeFazio said the training has to be on the crew members’ “own time and on their own dime … which I think is very problematic.”