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Flight Delays, Cancelations Frustrating Passengers At South Florida Airports

MIAMI (CBSMiami) - It's happening more often, where unruly passengers are misbehaving on planes.

One of the latest incidents was on a Frontier Airlines flight to Miami.

Max Berry is accused of groping flight attendants, then punching one in the face while being subdued. Eventually, he was taped to his seat.

"It tracks what we've seen on other flights. We've seen flight attendants take the brunt of passenger frustration," said David Slotnick with the aviation website, "The Points Guy."

According to a recent survey from the Association of Flight Attendants, it found that 85 percent of flight attendants dealt with Unruly passengers in the first 6 months of the 20-21.

It shows 58% experienced at least 5 incidents and 17 percent experienced a physical incident. Sara Nelson is president of the Association of Flight Attendants.

"We are on track to have 60x the number of unruly passengers as we might have had in a typical year," Nelson said.

So far, the FAA has logged more than 3,700 complaints of unruly passengers, 2,700 are mask-related.

It's gotten to the point where some flight attendants are taking self-defense classes offered by TSA. One is offered in Sunrise.

Flight attendants agree the federal mask mandate adds too much of the frustration, along with canceled and delayed flights and more.

"Another part of it is people, from what flight attendants are saying, are really out, ready to celebrate being about to go out again, being able to go on vacation again and people are letting loose, drinking too much before the flight, going with these party attitudes," Slotnick said.

The flight attendant's union is sharing the survey results with the F-A-A.

"The AFA says we need to see criminal prosecution, we need to be shown this example and it needs to happen often, more or less, every time," Slotnick said.

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