Flight attendants say they're nearing breaking point: 'My job is not to manage you'

Airline crews brace for holidays facing more unruly passengers than ever before.

A year and a half into the global pandemic, with the Omicron variant lurking and holiday travel looming, many flight attendants say they've reached their breaking point with unruly passengers, many of whom still refuse to respect mask mandates.

"My job is not to manage you, the one passenger that constantly needs to be reminded to put their mask on. My job is to manage getting people where they need to go as quickly and safely as possible," said Mitra Amirzadeh, a low-cost carrier flight attendant and Association of Flight Attendants member.

Dozens of videos over the past year have shown customers assaulting flight attendants, including one in which several passengers had to use duct tape to restrain an unruly man in his seat on a Frontier flight after he caused a disturbance with a flight attendant.

"Since the FAA started keeping track of reports of incidents like this on board, we've had more events in 2021 than we've had in the entire history of that record keeping in aviation," Sara Nelson, president of the AFA and a flight attendant for two decades, told ABC News. That record keeping began in 1995.