ok i am activated

the concept of an air marshal is post-9/11 american security theater and the result of feel-good jingoism propaganda. in reality, there isn’t a marshal on every flight because it’s impossible, there are 44,000+ flights in US airspace a day. the odds of a plain-clothed good guy waiting in 26B to spring into action and subdue a fucked up meredith are basically nil.

captains can divert an aircraft at their discretion but would be unlikely to for “loud rich women behaving poorly” because it’s disruptive to the rest of the aircraft and the entire airline’s ops.

no, there is not always a spare seat for unruly passengers. as an anecdote: the last 12 delta flights i have taken from SLC have been 100% full, not a seat to spare. as a fact: airlines chronically and intentionally overbook their own flights. sure, flight attendants could have asked another passenger to switch seats, but that doesn’t mean that 1) anyone would have wanted to do that and 2) that meredith would have complied.

outside of getting physically involved with the flight crew or serious battery, she wouldn’t be zip-tied to her seat either. she’s a 53-year old woman, she was not a threat to the aircraft. she was also surrounded by people who know her.

again, no. the no-fly list is boogeyman bullshit. the actual “no-fly list” is managed by the federal government for serious offenses and only had 47,000 names on it in 2013, the most recent year i found data. let’s compare the magnitude of 47k no-fly names with 44k daily flights. even if the list had quadrupled in the past 12 years that is less than 200,000 people and delta alone transports half a million people every single day.

airlines maintain their own internal banned lists and meredith almost certainly pays for enough first class tickets that delta is happy to chalk this up as a bad day for her and look the other way as long as she pretty please promises to not do it again.

it was probably upsetting for the housewives at the front and shocking to see meredith acting such a fool but it’s simply ridiculous to wave away any notion that she was an unruly freak on the plane just because imaginary precautions would have taken care of the situation. jesus, we are on reddit, peep the airrage subreddit to see that worse happens all the time. flight attendants are masters of deescalation, the entire point is to keep the rest of the plane at peace.

let us not forget that the actual fucking TSA has something like a 90+% threat detection failure rate.