The golden age of travel starts with the person in 22B

On November 19, 2025, the Secretary of Transportation launched a civility campaign called The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You, built around five questions for passengers, including whether you are helping others with their bags and thanking your flight attendants. The questions are good ones, and they will not carry far on their own, because civility in a cabin is manufactured upstream by the people who design the trip.

The objection raised in some quarters was that a department which regulates airlines should regulate airlines and leave manners to somebody else. Fix the delays, fix the refunds, fix the seat sizes. I understand the impulse, and rules that protect travelers are the foundation. When a carrier strands people overnight without a hotel, no amount of politeness in the cabin repairs the damage.

I worked the aisle for twenty-four years, and the moments that went wrong were rarely the work of a bad person. They were ordinary people at the end of a long day, doing what the environment invited: reclining into a laptop without looking, filling the bin above row eight on the way to row thirty, playing a video out loud, spreading into the middle seat’s eighteen inches without noticing. Put anyone in a space that offers no room for consideration, and inconsiderate is what comes out.

That space was designed. Two decades of cost-cutting, revenue optimization through ancillary fees, and now deregulation and algorithm-driven pricing have produced a journey in which almost every interaction is a charge, an upsell, or a denial. Seats have narrowed. Bins have become a contest. The passenger arrives after having already been asked for money five times and told “no” twice, and then we ask them to be gracious about the armrest.

The strain lands on the crew. The FAA logged more than 1,600 unruly-passenger incidents in 2025, down from the extraordinary 5,973 of 2021 but still roughly double the pre-2020 rate. The agency can propose fines of up to $43,658 per violation and refers the worst cases to the FBI. Behind each of those numbers is a crew member who had to make a judgment in a narrow aisle, in front of an audience, usually alone, about a person who had decided not to comply.

Flight attendants are safety professionals, trained for the fire, the decompression, the medical emergency, and the evacuation. The service in the cabin is hospitality laid on top of that training. Reduced staffing on many aircraft and turns that leave no margin mean those professionals now also absorb the anger an algorithm generated at the booking screen three days earlier.

It is not a coincidence that misconduct rose alongside higher fees, less personal space, and an experience engineered for the front of the aircraft. A journey built to extract from the person who paid the least will get the behavior it was built for. Treat that passenger well, and the cabin improves for everyone in it, including the passenger in 2A, because calm is contagious and so is resentment.

Thank the crew for a safe flight. It costs nothing and changes the last 90 seconds of someone’s workday. That is a rule in our Guide, and I will defend it anywhere.

Here is what I would add to those five questions, addressed to the industry. Are your people trained to ask for courtesy, and backed when they do? A crew member who asks a passenger to put headphones in should be able to point at a written rule. United wrote that rule into its contract of carriage in February 2026, in the section covering refusal of transport, and that single sentence does more for a flight attendant’s authority than a year of exhortation, because it moves the request off the individual and onto the airline.

Is the information a passenger needs available before they need it? Most of the anger I saw at the boarding door had been created hours earlier by something a passenger was never told. What the fare includes. What happens next. How long it takes.

Are you looking for the stress, or waiting for it to be reported? Every week somebody from the company should travel a piece of its own experience the way a first-time traveler does, from finding the website to leaving the terminal, and where a step makes people anxious or short with the people around them, that step should be removed rather than priced.

So, yes to the five questions. Help with the bag, thank the crew, and take your trash with you. And to the airlines, model the courtesy you are asking for by designing it into the product, because a golden age gets built when a company decides that the stress of getting somewhere belongs to the company rather than the customer. The passenger in 22B will meet that halfway. In my experience, they usually do once somebody has given them the room and the reason.