Fist Fight Breaks Out on Southwest Flight to Hawaii

A fight broke out on a Southwest Airlines flight heading to Hawaii on Monday.

A video posted on Instagram shows two men fighting on the flight before a passenger and crew members intervene.

The incident occurred on Southwest flight 1288 from Oakland, California to Lihue, about an hour after the plane took off, HawaiiNewsNow reported.

It was not immediately clear what prompted the fight, but a witness told the station that both men were detained after it landed.

"I heard yelling, screaming and punches. I turned around and saw one man bleeding and then the other man being separated," Jim Wieder, a passenger on the flight, told the station.

"Frankly, I was a little nervous because we're [at] 35,000 feet and you've got two guys swinging at each other, which makes no sense whatsoever."

In a statement to Newsweek, a Southwest spokesperson said local authorities met the flight when it landed.

"We commend our crew and customers for their professionalism in diffusing this situation," the statement said. "Our number one priority is the safety and well-being of our customers and employees. The flight landed safely at its scheduled destination and local authorities met the aircraft upon arrival."

Violent behavior on flights has increasingly made headlines in recent years as footage filmed by passengers is shared online.

Incidents where passengers have disrupted flights with threatening or violent behavior "are an ongoing problem and airlines have seen rapid growth in occurrences since 2021," the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration says on its website.

There have been 206 reports of unruly passengers so far in 2024, according to the FAA. There were some 2,075 unruly passenger reports last year, down from 2,455 in 2022 and 5,973 in 2021.

In November, a passenger reportedly attacked an airline staffer after he was asked to leave a plane at Miami International Airport.

A study conducted by researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas, which looked at hundreds of cases of misconduct on flights between 1999 and 2020, found verbal misconduct was the most-common type of incident. Physical misconduct accounted for 15 percent of incidents.

The study said that alcohol consumption was one of the factors that led to passengers misbehaving on flights.

"In a number of instances that we reviewed, people were already intoxicated as they were boarding the aircraft," Sheryl Skaggs, a professor of sociology at UT Dallas, told Newsweek last year.

"Gate personnel are not necessarily on the lookout for intoxicated passengers. I think more personnel to monitor those situations where passengers are demonstrating signs of intoxication would help."

Update 2/13/24, 4:55 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.

Update 2/13/24, 7:20 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with a statement from Southwest Airlines.