This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.

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Flying can be a nightmare in the best of times — long security lines, cramped quarters, unexpected fees, and worst of all: delays and cancellations. All of which can get exponentially worse around the holidays, which are some of the busiest travel days of the year.

Take, for example, the case of Amanda Nickerson.

A few years ago, Nickerson decided to do something special ahead of Christmas — take a relaxing, week-long trip to sunny Las Vegas to visit extended family. 

So, on Dec. 17, she, along with her husband and two young kids, jumped on a plane from Cleveland headed west, with plans to return to their Ohio home on Dec. 22, plenty of time before Christmas. But on the day they were supposed to depart, they got an unwelcome surprise — a snowstorm had grounded planes across the country, including theirs. 

“So initially we were thinking, ‘Well, it’s okay — we’ll just try to get out the next day and we’ll just make the most of being out here,” Nickerson said.

They rebooked their flight for the next day — but it was also canceled. So they rebooked once again, for Christmas Eve.

On that day, Nickerson and her family arrived at the airport around 11 a.m. They returned their rental car and checked their luggage. 

“And then we just kept watching as all of the boards pretty much across every flight just kept saying canceled,” Nickerson said.

They kept hoping that, somehow, they would make it out of there. At first, the airport workers were accommodating and apologetic. But as the day went on, Nickerson says, they also grew increasingly short.

“I think they were getting tired and disgruntled as well because people get frustrated in the line and they were taking it out on them too,” Nickerson said.

The hours kept ticking away without any news — and Nickerson’s two kids started melting down. She even has a picture memorializing the day of her son crying on a countertop as she and her husband attempted to rebook their flight yet again.

“We were there eight more hours after that, trying to get on another flight that never made it off the ground.”

Over those next eight hours, Nickerson started falling apart too.

“I was trying to keep my emotions in check for the kids at that point,” she said. “It was so late. They were tired. They had been crying on and off. I wanted to cry because I felt so bad.”

All around them, people were either worn out or freaking out, many of them sprawled out on the floor, using their bags as pillows, while others argued loudly with airline staff.

There was nowhere to go, nowhere to rest — and soon, it was hard to even get food. With so many people stranded at the airport, the restaurants were mobbed. After awhile, they started running out of food.

Finally, after spending 12 hours at the airport on Christmas Eve, Nickerson and her family decided to leave and book a hotel — and that’s where they ended up spending Christmas, in a hotel room in Vegas.

“We were still together, we still got to celebrate, and then we kind of got to celebrate a second time once we finally made it home,” Nickerson said. “[We] got to enjoy the tree and some relaxation in our own beds, our own house!”

It’s the worst-case scenario when it comes to holiday travel. Nickerson and her family bore up pretty well under the circumstances — but not all passengers are so even-keeled.

And the people who bear the brunt of passengers’ anger and frustration? Flight attendants and airport staff. 

Decline in customer service — and passenger behavior

Faye Lane started working as a flight attendant in 2001 — just before 9/11 thrust the airline industry into chaos.

Before 2001, airlines had been more focused on competing based on customer service — but after 9/11, their attention turned more to security. In the meantime, passenger fears caused business to tank, and multiple airlines went under. The ones that remained cut staff and amenities like free meals; they added fees for baggage, and crammed more and smaller seats into the cabin. 

Back then, Lane — a storyteller and performer — was looking for a regular paycheck to support her creative endeavors, which is when she remembered her childhood dream of being a flight attendant. 

“As a little girl, I had a Barbie friendship airplane and I saw images of glamorous stewardesses on TV and in the movies,” she said. “And I just thought, ‘How amazing to get paid to fly through the air!’”

Lane did her training in Miami. She’s by nature both a caretaker and an adventurous spirit, and she loved the idea of being able to indulge in both for a living. Then, she actually started the job.

“The epiphany that I had almost immediately was that people are horrible,” Lane said with a laugh. “Most people are wonderful, but when you put them in an aluminum tube in the sky, under very stressful and infantilizing conditions, people can behave very, very badly — and often do.”

She understood why. As security concerns ramped up, and airlines’ profits declined, the customer experience had gotten worse and worse — and Lane often bore the brunt of all that passenger frustration.

Pretty quickly, she started to understand why some of her veteran coworkers seemed so, for lack of a better word, bitter. In fact, at one point her airline had to send out a memo, requesting that when flight attendants were collecting people’s garbage, they refer to it as “service items.”

“Because a lot of the flight attendants were so jaded and frustrated and people were behaving so badly that the flight attendants would say, ‘Trash, sir — your trash. Ma’am, your whole family’s trash,’ because people were just behaving so badly.”

In the 20-plus years Lane has spent as a flight attendant, she’s had to deal with passengers cursing at her, smoking on the plane, ignoring her safety instructions — but one of the worst incidents she can remember was when she was helping a man who was having a heart attack.

“So the flight crew, who is really there primarily for this reason, for safety reasons, we immediately went into action to save this guy’s life,” she said. 

The crew had laid the man out in the aisle, opened his shirt, and stuck defibrillator pads to his chest. Lane was kneeling beside him, holding an oxygen bottle to his face — when suddenly a woman behind Lane tapped her on the shoulder.

“And I said, ‘Just a minute, please, just please, one minute,’” Lane said. “And the customer tapped me on the shoulder again. And this woman was very insistent. And I said, ‘Ma’am, please — we are trying to save this man’s life.’”

Suddenly, Lane realized that maybe the woman was trying to get her attention because she had some important information — maybe she was a doctor, or maybe she knew something about the man’s medical history. So Lane turned around to ask the woman what she wanted.

“And she literally held up her coffee cup and she said, ‘This coffee is cold,’” Lane said. “And that’s when I realized that people can be quite cold.”

When delays and cancellations strike

Lane’s experiences aren’t unique, as documented by social media accounts like Instagram’s Passenger Shaming — but customer behavior can get even worse when flyers face their worst travel nightmares: delays and cancellations.

So what do flight attendants and airport workers do when passengers are freaking out?

No one knows better than Frederick Reitz, the founder of an aviation security company called SAFEsky, who spent 20 years working in the field.

“I started out on the ramp loading bags and ended up as a manager of security for an airline,” Reitz said.

As a security manager, it was Reitz’s job to deal with unruly passengers — and he says, these days, there seem to be more of them than ever.

“Right now, the new thing since COVID is a lot of people are still stressed about traveling,” Reitz said. “And the flights are very full. And with the holiday season coming up, they’re really going to be packed.”

On those days, passengers find themselves dealing with long waits, slow-moving security lines, crowded gates with nowhere to sit, and overhead bins packed to the gills — on top of the usual travel- and holiday-related anxieties.

“And all of these things lead to stress,” Reitz said. “And then we’re finding, and as I do my research for my doctorate, is that the stress is what’s kicking off higher levels of arguments on board the flights, especially during the holidays.”

Resolving conflict before it starts

The doctorate Reitz is currently working on is in conflict analysis and resolution. He only started working on it a couple years ago, but he says the seed was planted in the aftermath of 9/11, when airlines shifted their focus from customer service to security. The result was not only a more harried and stressful experience for passengers, but in the worst cases, an uptick in violent incidents — both perpetrated by passengers, and against passengers. 

So Reitz has been thinking about how airline workers can try and defuse conflict before it starts. And he says a big part of that is better communication — especially when it comes to the thing passengers hate the most: delays and cancellations

“You can’t get excited and you have to clearly communicate with the passengers what’s going on,” Reitz said. “People understand if you give them a reason.”

Reitz says airlines need to train their staff to communicate more and more clearly. Instead making of a vague, muffled announcement that people can barely hear, Reitz says, airline staff should be loud, specific, and clear about delays, why they’re happening, and when they’ll have updates.

“We need a way to really make sure that people can hear us without screaming, without yelling, and then teach the gate agents to be a little bit more empathetic too,” Reitz said.

Empathy is a big focus of another longtime aviation expert — Tom Murphy, who was hired by airports in the late 90s to train their staff in customer service. 

Murphy says the focus of his initial program boiled down to one thing: being aware of passengers’ needs.

“This is the key,” Murphy said. “Need is always from the customer’s point of view. And if you’re thinking of them, you’re striving to meet their needs. And therefore you’re going to keep them relaxed.”

So, for example, their need to get through the airport to their gate; their need to buy a sandwich or newspaper; their need for information — and, ultimately, their need to get where they’re trying to go.

When people’s needs are met, Murphy says, they’re usually pretty nice. The same guy yelling at airline workers about his delayed flight might be a great guy the rest of the time — the kind of host on Thanksgiving who welcomes his guests with a drink and a smile.

“But now he’s screaming at you,” Murphy said. “What do you do? Well, try to find out what his need is, identify how it’s not getting met, and then try to help him get it met. And that’s how you take the edge of a customer.”

Of course, airline staff can’t always meet customers’ needs. For instance, flight attendants can’t un-cancel a flight, or do anything about delays. In those cases, Murphy says, it’s important to just be there with them in their frustration and show them that you’re trying to help.

“You try to find some way to help that person find somebody that can help them, or a route,” Murphy said. “The minute that you step forward into the situation, that person who is stressed is going to immediately begin to calm down if they sense that you’re on their side, trying to help them get that need met. That’s the key.”

Frederick Reitz says there are also bigger fixes that need to happen. For example, he says that airlines often overload flights, which makes for a cramped flying experience. They also sometimes schedule flights too close together, making connections stressful for passengers. A lot of them are understaffed, which makes it harder to get information and help. 

When all else fails — rely on empathy

But until those fixes come, the burden remains on flight crews and airport staff to deal with difficult and frustrated passengers. 

Faye Lane says she already does a lot of the things that Reitz and Murphy recommend. She leads with kindness and compassion. She smiles and listens. She focuses on their needs, and communicates as much as she can. And, when there’s nothing else she can do, she tries to empathize.

“If someone’s very frustrated or annoyed, I will go there with them,” Lane said, “Like, ‘Oh my gosh, I know, right? It’s so frustrating. It’s so annoying. Oh, I wish I could fix it!’ And then I can calm down and they’ll generally come with me.”

It doesn’t always work — but sometimes, she says, passengers surprise her. Like this one time in the early 2000s, when she and her passengers got stuck on a plane for hours after being diverted due to weather.

“We ran out of food; the bathrooms were full,” Lane said. “Clearly, people were trapped,”

The flight had been diverted to Dulles on their way back to JFK — and the airport where they’d landed was closed.

“So we were stuck on the plane,” Lane said. “Obviously, it was incredibly frustrating. People wanted to get off. We couldn’t let them off because there was nowhere for them to go. There was no one to receive them at the airport.”

As they sat, waiting for the all-clear to take off again, Lane watched the mood of the passengers change in waves. First, they were furious. Then, they all got exhausted.

“And then, at like the fourth hour, this amazing thing happened where we all just sort of relaxed into it and bonded,” Lane said. “And little families and groups and subgroups were forming and people were talking and sharing stories, and by the end of this insane experience, customers were hugging me when they left. We all bonded on this common nightmare of an experience.

As physically exhausting and emotionally difficult as it was, it’s one of my favorite flight memories because I just got to see how people actually are. And when we treated them with kindness, they responded with kindness and compassion.”