Threats of jail time may serve as a deterrent, but charging drunk passengers for the expenses related to their poor conduct onboard strikes me as the ideal way to deter bad behavior.
Drunk Passenger Must Pay Up For Flight Diversion
A man named Wade Corbett was traveling on a Jetstar (a low-cost subsidiary of Qantas) from Perth (PER) to Sydney (SYD). He had a tipple or two…and became drunk and disruptive onboard. In fact, his behavior was so bad that the pilots elected to return to Perth to dump him…
They also had to dump unused fuel before landing…quite a bit since the flight was scheduled all the way to Sydney, over 2,000 miles away.
The wheels of justice move slowly and even though the incident occurred on September 25, 2023 and Corbett pleaded guilty, it was just this week that sentencing occurred. Corbett must pay:
- 8,630 AUD in compensation for the wasted fuel
- 9,000 AUD fine
At today’s exchange rate, that is 11,828.23 USD, which may not seem like much, but is real money to most people and should offset some of the expenses (though it seems a bit low to me considering the cost of jet fuel).
I’m not opposed to flight bans or community service (both would still be appropriate here), but at the very least the airline (and even the passengers inconvenienced onboard) should be made whole. An airline should not have to pay the extra fuel, labor, and rebooking expenses incurred due to the poor behavior of a passenger onboard. I would also have liked to see a $200-400 cash payment offered to every passenger onboard as well since our time is worth money…
But this is good…we need to see more of this and more of it published. Money does talk and if people fear they will actually have to pay up for their bad behavior onboard, I do think they will…on average at least…be more careful.
image: Jetstar
It’s fair but at the end of the day, the fellow passengers were the ones who lose as they got to SYD a lot later and may have missed a connection or meeting or something.
If it were flying blue and they used sustainable aviation fuel, then he would’ve gotten about 1000 XP or Ulti for one year, one year of Plat status afterwards, and a total of three years counting towards Plat for Life (this is a lighthearted joke, by the way)
If you elect to fly on Jetstar over Qantas or Virgin, on a long sector like PER-SYD, I can almost guarantee that AUD 18k is a huge amount of money for you. Well deserved.
Well good. I support seizure of assets and wage garnishments until the debt has been satisfied. All of it. Bad actions should have consequences.
Good outcome.
It was reported widely here in Australia a=at the time and it was also revealed he was on that particular flight to make it to Sydney for a court appearance. He’s no stranger to issues with the law it seems…
Pretty sure they are not using airplanes on that route capable of dumping fuel, seems mostly to be A321. The fuel price is probably just for what was used, not dumped. Mini detail..