A headache for everyone.
A British Airways flight from London to Austin, Texas, departed two hours late Monday after two passengers got into an altercation over a red “Make America Great Again” hat.
The altercation was reportedly between two women—one wearing the hat, and another who took offense at the hat and requested it be removed. Both passengers were booked in Premium Economy and had just boarded the flight from Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 for the flight to Austin when things got heated. The argument escalated and the confrontation became physical, spurring the flight crew to request police assistance.
Both passengers were ultimately escorted off the aircraft by police and continued to shout insults at each other in the gate area. Several media outlets are reporting that both passengers involved in the incident appeared to be American. The flight ultimately departed without either passenger onboard, and there’s been no further update on whether the two women were eventually permitted to travel.
No charges have yet been filed, and both passengers claim it was the other who instigated the fight and landed the first punch.
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Complaints of altercations and other abusive behavior spiked in 2022 after the pandemic, but have since leveled off. Airlines are typically quick to remove passengers who behave in a threatening or violent manner. Airlines in both the US and UK also prohibit passengers from wearing clothing bearing offensive or objectionable messaging, although there’s no set standard for what exactly constitutes objectionable content, leaving the question up to airlines to enforce on a case-by-case basis.
Earlier this month, a passenger was asked to deplane a Delta Air Lines flight at San Francisco International Airport so she could change out of a shirt deploring veteran suicides. The passenger was allowed to travel after she changed her shirt. In that incident, there were no reports of confrontation between passengers.
While clothing infractions can typically be resolved by passengers agreeing to remove the clothing items that are cause for concern, cases involving confrontational or combative passengers require other considerations. The risk of a boarding altercation recurring once the aircraft reaches altitude is considered, and the stakes are higher once the flight has departed. In severe cases, disruptive passengers can cause a flight to divert to another city en route out of safety concerns. Commercial flight diversions are costly, and inconvenient, oftentimes requiring overnight stopovers in diversion cities if the onboard crew runs up against a duty time restriction.
Airlines sometimes bill unruly passengers for the costs related to a flight diversion, but even with the costs covered, they’re a significant headache for passengers, often delaying their journeys by a full day or more.
Flight BA191 arrived in Austin at 7:42 PM CDT on Monday evening, an hour and 47 minutes behind schedule. Many passengers traveling to the United States on British Airways flights have booked same-day connections on American Airlines—a Oneworld alliance partner of British Airways—to other cities in North America. There’s no word on whether the delay required any connecting passengers to be rebooked onto later flights. Monday’s return flight from Austin to London Heathrow remained behind schedule, departing the Texas city an hour and 28 minutes late, arriving into Heathrow nearly two hours late on Tuesday afternoon.
In a statement to the British tabloid The Sun, British Airways said, “We apologized to our customers for the delay and got them on the way as quickly as possible.”
The Metropolitan (London) Police have said they are continuing to investigate the incident, but have not reportedly taken either passenger into custody over their accusations against each other.
