Unruly airline passengers face thousands in fines as air travel picks up

A passenger on a JetBlue flight from New York has been accused of putting her finger in her nose and yelling and cursing at a flight attendant who asked her to put on her mask, forcing the plane to land in Fort Lauderdale instead of Cancun. The incident is one of four in which people accused of disrupting flights are facing fines as high as $15,500, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday. 

The FAA said it has received more than 3,000 reports of unruly passenger behavior since the beginning of the year. The announcement comes after two Delta flights were diverted last week because of unruly passengers. The fines for the four different incidents, all of which occurred in February, were announced as post-pandemic travel picks up: More than 5.9 million passengers were screened by the Transportation Security Administration from Friday through Sunday, the most in a three-day period in the last 15 months.