Opinion: The DOT’s tone-deaf new campaign wants you to dress nicer — as if that will fix flying in 2025

The Department of Transportation would like Americans to know that the “Golden Age of Travel” is here — or rather, it could be, if only we’d all dress a little nicer, control our children better, and remember to say please and thank you. That’s the message from Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy, who this month unveiled a new nationwide “civility campaign” aimed at curbing what he calls the rise of unruly passengers.

First, the uncomfortable facts: The FAA has logged a 400 percent increase in in-flight outbursts since 2019, and 2024 saw double the number of unruly incidents compared with 2019. Flight attendants have been reporting physical assaults at alarming rates. All of those issues are real problems — for crew, for passengers, for everyone. There are real jerks out there. But this campaign has little to do with them.

Like most passengers, I almost always fly economy (alas), and often with kids in tow. And I can tell you that the DOT’s list of “questions to ask yourself” feels ripped from a 1950s Pan Am brochure, not a realistic assessment of what flying in 2025 actually looks like.

Asking if we’re “dressing with respect” isn’t going to fix the cramped cabins, maddening a la carte pricing models, endless delays, sprint-to-make-it connections, or the basic exhaustion that comes from trying to get anywhere in a system that’s been cut to the bone.

As a travel writer, I’ve been very lucky to fly business class on a handful of work trips. It is, unsurprisingly, dramatically more comfortable than coach. But even there, you want to wear something you can actually sleep in on an overnight flight. You still have to hit the ground running the next morning. Who is boarding an 11-hour red-eye in a three-piece suit to prove their “respect” for air travel? The ask isn’t just outdated — it’s completely disconnected from how regular people live and work.

Flying today has become a cage match for overhead bin space. A race to see whether you’ll get a cup of water before turbulence shuts down service for the rest of the flight. A test of whether your checked bag will appear at all. None of this stuff is about passengers failing to use their manners. Rather, it’s about an airline ecosystem that is increasingly strained, understaffed, and designed to make travelers as uncomfortable as possible while charging more every year for the privilege of teeny upgrades.

And yet the DOT’s new campaign places the responsibility squarely on passengers’ shoulders. If things get ugly in the sky, it implies, that’s because travelers aren’t behaving — not because airlines overschedule, understaff, pack flights to the gills, and leave people stressed to the point of combustion (or the market conditions that lead to those boardroom decisions).

Yes, unruly behavior is absolutely unacceptable. Yes, people should say please and thank you and keep their hands to themselves. Everyone who wasn’t raised in a barn knows that. And the people who act a fool up there should be ashamed — even punished.

But a government campaign lecturing Americans about “courtesy and class” in the same breath as… well, everything else the government is doing these days? That’s not a fix… it’s a ridiculous deflection.

Listen, we can put on hard pants before we board our next flight… but it’s still going to feel like 2025 in coach.