Why Airlines Think They Are Above The Law, And Why They Must Be Held Accountable

Editor’s Note: This editorial draws on more than 25 years of independent travel, first-hand experience and publicly documented evidence and regulatory changes. Many of these editorials were written years before the issues became mainstream, and have been updated to reflect current developments while remaining true to their original arguments.

Airlines have become far too comfortable over the years treating passengers as an inconvenience rather than the paying customers who keep them in business. For decades, too many have behaved as though customer service is optional, consumer rights are little more than an inconvenience and the law is something to be interpreted rather than obeyed. When flights are delayed or cancelled, passengers are routinely left fighting for refunds and compensation they are already entitled to. When airlines make mistakes, it is all too often the customer who is expected to bear the cost.

It is a story repeated every single day in airports across the world. Flights are cancelled or delayed and airlines simply shrug their shoulders. Passengers are denied boarding because an airline sold more seats than it actually had available. Legitimate compensation claims disappear into endless customer service black holes, passengers are routinely misled about the rights they actually have and too many airlines have built entire systems designed to make claiming those rights so frustrating that many people simply give up.

But the problem goes far deeper than that. The excessive operational authority airlines have been allowed has created a power imbalance so great, airlines now feel comfortable using hyper escalation, violence and violating passengers human rights far beyond the remit of their own business operations.

That culture has been allowed to flourish because airlines have grown accustomed to acting with impunity. Time and again they have behaved as though they are above meaningful accountability, confident that the chances of facing real consequences are slim. Any punishments for breaking the law, if any are handed out at all, are so weak and ineffective airlines see them merely as an acceptable cost of doing business. That needs to end.

It is time they were reminded that they are not a law unto themselves. They provide a service to paying customers, and those customers deserve to be treated with honesty, respect and the protection of the law.

Four years ago, I argued that airlines had become far too comfortable thinking they are above the law. They had grown accustomed to treating paying customers as an inconvenience, ignoring their legal obligations whenever it suited them and behaving as though they were somehow above the law.

Very little has fundamentally changed. Some progress has undoubtedly been made, and a handful of long-overdue reforms have finally begun to appear, but the culture that allowed this behaviour to flourish remains stubbornly intact. If anything, the events of the last four years have only strengthened my conviction that airlines still need to be held properly accountable.

The Warning Signs Were Already There

For decades the airline industry has been engaged in a relentless race to the bottom, where every year seems to bring another round of shrinking seats, disappearing customer service, new ancillary charges and increasingly creative ways of making it harder for passengers to exercise rights they already have.

The big problem is that this has become the norm. Passengers have gradually become conditioned to accept things that would be considered unconscionable in any other industry. Delayed or cancelled flight? Tough luck, you can deal with it yourself as air and ground crew disappear, and they will make it as difficult as they can for you to exercise your legal rights for compensation. Denied boarding because they have sold your seat three times over? Have an issue on board the aircraft or disagree with the crew for any issue whatsoever? Good luck with that! Crew have the ultimate power in that tiny little bubble between the airport and the cabin and they wield it with a vicious iron fist. And don’t ever question that authority unless you want the police calling and be labelled a security risk. Want to complain about any aspect of service to the customer service team afterward? I think you’ll find the tiny department has no one actually working there, just a bot who will say ‘sorry to hear that, please DM us more details’, and then endlessly ignore you until you go away. Unless of course you get through to Ryanair’s customer service team who will happily just gaslight and insult you publicly for your troubles.

All of that might sound like little more than the familiar grumblings of frequent travellers, but underneath it lies something much more significant. Aviation has always required a degree of authority. It has to. Aircraft operate in a uniquely controlled environment where the captain and crew must have the power to make decisions that protect the safety of everyone on board. Nobody disputes that. The problem is that many airlines have gradually allowed that legitimate operational authority to evolve into something far broader. Too often it has become an assumption of absolute authority, where questioning an incorrect decision is treated almost as an act of defiance rather than a perfectly reasonable challenge, and where passengers are expected to accept every decision without question, regardless of whether it concerns safety, customer service, compensation, boarding, baggage or even the law itself.

From the moment you check in the balance of power shifts almost entirely in the airline’s favour, and some airlines have become far too comfortable with that reality. When an industry becomes accustomed to operating without meaningful scrutiny or accountability, that mindset inevitably filters through every level of the customer experience.

In almost any other industry, repeatedly refusing to honour statutory consumer rights, forcing customers into court to recover money they are legally owed or imposing policies that directly contradict official government guidance or even legislation, would invite swift regulatory intervention and substantial penalties. In aviation, it became so commonplace that many travellers simply came to accept it as part of flying.

Does no one remember the violent removal of Dr David Dao from a United Airlines flight in 2017. United had oversold the aircraft, a problem entirely of its own making, yet instead of accepting the consequences of that commercial decision it violently removed a paying passenger who had done absolutely nothing wrong. The footage rightly caused international outrage, but the most disturbing part wasn’t simply what happened to Dr Dao. It was the mindset behind it. Somewhere within that organisation, people genuinely believed that dragging an innocent passenger bleeding through the cabin was preferable to admitting the airline had made a mistake.

Then came the Brexit passport validity fiasco, another perfect illustration of the same mentality. The rules themselves were never especially complicated. The European Commission and the UK Government had both published clear guidance explaining exactly when a British passport remained valid for travel to the EU. Despite that, airlines including easyJet, and to a lesser extent Ryanair, began refusing boarding to passengers whose passports were entirely valid under those official rules. Families lost holidays, business travellers missed meetings and thousands of pounds disappeared because airline staff, exercising absolute authority at the departure gate, incorrectly decided that passengers could not travel.

For everyone’s information, the passport rules from the UK to the EU are pretty simple. It has to have been issued in the last ten years and have 3 months left on it from the date you leave your destination country. Not six, seven, eight or nine, or any other number the airline was making up on the spot.

The most astonishing part was that the airlines were wrong. Not arguably wrong. Not open to interpretation. Wrong. The European Commission ultimately confirmed that the airlines’ interpretation of the rules was ‘incorrect’, eventually forcing them to amend their guidance and fall into line with the actual law. Yet nothing was said about the fact they had actually broken it. If I break the law, I don’t get to explain to a judge that I was merely ‘incorrect’. Why should airlines?

But standing at that departure gate, passengers had no meaningful recourse. It didn’t matter what the law actually said because, in that moment, the airline’s interpretation became the only interpretation that mattered.

This is the exact problem. Despite ruining thousands of journeys, exercising authority they should never have been allowed to have in the first place and directly contradicting official government guidance and specifically in this case the EU Schengen Borders Code legislation, there were no meaningful consequences. The passengers suffered the financial loss, the stress and the disappointment. The airlines quietly corrected their ‘mistake’, and I use that term in the most sarcastic way possible, and carried on.

Those examples formed a central part of the argument when this article was first written in 2022, just two examples of why the airline regulations and enforcements need serious overhaul, and yet nothing has changed. If anything it has gotten worse. Since then, Wizz Air has faced enforcement action after repeatedly failing passengers over rerouting, delays and compensation. Ryanair has found itself under investigation over consumer practices affecting families travelling with children. In one extraordinary case, bailiffs even boarded a Ryanair aircraft because the airline repeatedly ignored a court order requiring it to pay compensation it already owed. Different airlines, different headlines, exactly the same culture.

At some point we have to ask ourselves a simple question. Why do we continue to tolerate behaviour from airlines that we would never accept from almost any other private business? If a bank repeatedly refused to honour its legal obligations, if an insurer routinely ignored consumer law or if a retailer openly contradicted official government guidance before quietly correcting itself after customers had already suffered the consequences, there would quite rightly be public outrage and swift regulatory action. In aviation, we’ve somehow allowed that behaviour to become normal.

That, more than any individual incident, is the real problem. The issue has never been one rogue airline, one bad decision or one spectacular public relations disaster. It is an industry that has gradually become accustomed to exercising extraordinary power over its customers while facing remarkably little accountability when it gets things wrong. Somewhere along the way we stopped asking why, and simply accepted that this was how flying worked. We shouldn’t have.

Then Airlines Crossed A Line That Should Never Have Been Crossed

If the previous decade demonstrated that airlines had become comfortable ignoring customer rights, the pandemic revealed something far more disturbing. It showed just how quickly private companies were prepared to assume extraordinary powers that society has spent eighty plus years trying to protect against, how little pushback they received for doing so, and how readily fundamental rights and principles that had been treated as sacrosanct for generations could suddenly become conditional.

That should concern every one of us, because once rights become optional whenever circumstances are deemed exceptional, they stop being rights at all. They become privileges, granted or withdrawn on a whim according to whoever happens to be exercising power at the time, and no private business, much less an airline, should ever be allowed to wield that kind of unchecked authority over the public.

For me, this was the moment the airline industry crossed a line from which it should never simply be allowed to forget or get away with without significant regulatory punishment and restriction.

Almost immediately, airlines across the world began introducing sweeping conditions for travel that extended far beyond what even some governments were willing to impose. Unscientific mask requirements were brutally enforced and remained in place on many airlines long after governments had begun removing their own domestic requirements. Vaccination requirements were imposed against every principle of medical ethics and human rights legislation around privacy and dignity, and airlines demanded compliance with policies that reached deeply into passengers’ personal medical circumstances. Passengers who were entitled to travel under exemptions or existing legal protections often found themselves having to justify those circumstances to unqualified and despotic airline staff at check-in desks and boarding gates, despite specific human rights legislation saying they had every right to not be challenged.

Non compliance was met with at best boarding denial or removal, or at worst arrest, criminal records, fines and placement on no fly lists.

The fact that private companies became remarkably comfortable exercising extraordinary authority over their customers in ways that would have seemed unimaginable only months earlier should be terrifying to everyone.

I wasn’t looking at this simply as another disgruntled traveller. At the time I wrote this original article I had a decade of experience in emergency nursing, travel medicine and infection prevention control. I had spent my career working within and championing established medical ethics such as patient confidentiality, informed consent and evidence-based practice. Those weren’t fashionable slogans that appeared overnight because there was a crisis. They were long-established principles developed over decades precisely because they protect individuals when circumstances become difficult, emotions run high and institutions begin demanding extraordinary things. Watching so many of those principles disappear almost overnight was one of the most professionally disturbing things I have ever witnessed.

That should have prompted a far louder public debate than it ever did. For decades we have been told that medical privacy matters. We have been taught that equality protections matter, that informed consent matters and that there are clear limits on the powers private organisations should exercise over individuals. Those principles are supposed to exist precisely because rights are most vulnerable when fear and uncertainty make it easiest to cast them aside. Instead, many people seemed perfectly willing to accept that they had suddenly become conditional. Conditional on circumstances. Conditional on corporate policy. Conditional on whether questioning them was socially acceptable at the time. Conditional on fear.

What I found equally disturbing was the atmosphere that developed around anyone who dared to question where those boundaries should have been. Raising concerns was too often treated as evidence that you yourself were the problem. Asking whether a private airline should be exercising a particular power frequently became confused with questioning public health altogether. Nuance disappeared. Debate disappeared. The assumption seemed to become that if a measure was introduced during a crisis then its legitimacy no longer needed to be examined. Even now, years later that still terrifies and enrages me in equal measure. The whole point of enduring ethical principles is that they continue to matter when circumstances are difficult, not that they quietly disappear until life returns to normal.

History teaches us an uncomfortable lesson here. The greatest danger is rarely that extraordinary powers are seized by force overnight. More often they become accepted because they are presented as temporary, necessary and for everyone’s benefit. That is precisely why free societies have spent generations developing principles around individual liberty, proportionality, equality before the law and limits on institutional power. Those principles were never designed for easy times. They were designed for moments exactly like these, when fear makes abandoning them feel reasonable.

And yet that is exactly what did happen. They were abandoned. And most people cheered it on.

Years later, most of those extraordinary airline policies have quietly disappeared. The announcements stopped. The restrictions were removed. The requirements that once seemed beyond question faded away with remarkably little acknowledgement that they had ever existed. What has not disappeared, however, is the complete lack of meaningful reflection from an industry that, in my view, discovered just how much authority it could exercise over its passengers when circumstances allowed it. There has been no serious collective examination of where the proper limits of private corporate power should have been, no meaningful acknowledgement that important principles were tested and no appetite from either the industry or many regulators to ask whether those boundaries should ever have been crossed in the first place.

That is what still angers me years later. Not simply that it happened, but how quickly we seem prepared to pretend it never did. We watch documentaries about history and ask how ordinary institutions, respected professions and otherwise decent people could ever have accepted extraordinary exercises of power without asking where the limits should have been. Then, when faced with our own period of crisis, far too many people accepted exactly that because it was easier than asking difficult questions.

If fundamental rights, long-established ethical principles and accepted limits on institutional power can become conditional whenever circumstances are declared exceptional, only to be quietly restored afterwards without anyone ever having to explain, justify or even properly examine what happened, then we are left with a profoundly uncomfortable question.

What are those principles actually worth?

Airlines Must Never Be Allowed To Forget

Now that the restrictions have disappeared, there is an unspoken expectation that everyone should simply move on. The signs have come down, the announcements have stopped and the extraordinary measures that once dominated every airport and every flight have quietly faded into history. It is almost as though the industry hopes that if enough time passes, passengers will simply forget the powers airlines assumed, the way those powers were exercised and the extraordinary willingness of so many people to accept them without question.

That would be a profound mistake.

If there is one lesson the regulators should take from that period, it is not that it successfully navigated an unprecedented crisis. It is that, in my view, it became far too comfortable exercising authority that should always have been subject to far greater scrutiny than it received. More troubling still is how there has been zero repercussions or consequence for this. Given the whitewash of the Covid Inquiry that is hardly surprising, but that only justifies in the airlines and the regulators minds that the fact that there has also been no meaningful reflection about where those boundaries should have been is fine too. Instead of asking difficult questions, acknowledging mistakes and rebuilding trust, the industry has largely behaved as though that entire chapter is best left quietly forgotten.

A regulator that never asks whether institutions exceeded their proper role is pointless. A regulator that does not hold airlines to account or punish them for overstepping their boundaries is not fit for purpose. If airlines are simply allowed to close the book, move on and carry on exactly as before, then the next time another crisis arrives they will have learned precisely the wrong lesson. They will have learned that extraordinary powers can be exercised without meaningful consequence and quietly abandoned once they are no longer needed.

That is exactly why regulators cannot afford to treat the last few years as an unfortunate historical anomaly. They need to recognise them for what they were: the clearest possible demonstration of what happens when an industry already accustomed to weak enforcement, limited accountability and enormous operational authority is allowed to operate with even fewer meaningful constraints. If there is to be any lasting positive legacy from that period, it must be a regulatory system finally prepared to hold airlines to the standards passengers have always been promised but so rarely received.

Thankfully, there are finally signs that this may, at long last, be beginning to happen.

Is The Tide Finally Turning?

For the first time in a very long time, there are at least tentative signs that regulators are beginning to recognise what passengers have been saying for years. The airline industry has spent decades behaving as though consumer protection law is something to be negotiated rather than complied with, forcing ordinary travellers to become legal experts simply to recover money or assistance they were already entitled to. That culture did not develop overnight, and it certainly won’t disappear overnight, but there are finally indications that things are changing.

Since this article was first published in 2022, there have finally been signs that regulators are beginning to lose patience with an industry that has spent far too long treating passenger rights as optional. For years airlines have relied on the simple calculation that denying compensation, delaying refunds or making legitimate claims so frustrating that passengers eventually give up is often cheaper than complying with the law in the first place. Regulators now appear to be recognising that the only way to change that culture is to make ignoring passengers’ rights more expensive than respecting them.

The UK Civil Aviation Authority has taken formal enforcement action against Wizz Air following persistent concerns over the airline’s handling of delays, cancellations, rerouting and its failure to meet passenger rights obligations. As part of that action, the airline was required to review more than 25,000 passenger claims, ultimately refunding around £1.24 million to approximately 6,000 passengers who had previously been denied money they were entitled to receive. The regulator also required Wizz Air to improve its procedures, passenger communications and handling of future claims. That is precisely the sort of intervention passengers have been crying out for for years.

Ryanair has also found itself facing increasing scrutiny. The Competition and Markets Authority has opened a formal consumer law investigation into the airline’s policy of requiring parents travelling with young children to pay mandatory seat reservation fees in order to sit together. The regulator is examining whether that requirement amounts to an unfair contract term and whether families are effectively being charged for the airline to meet obligations it should already be fulfilling. Under the strengthened consumer enforcement regime introduced through the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, regulators can now impose fines of up to 10% of a company’s global turnover for infringements of consumer protection law, a level of sanction that finally has the potential to make even the largest airlines pay attention.

Then there was the extraordinary spectacle of bailiffs boarding a Ryanair aircraft after the airline repeatedly failed to comply with a court order requiring it to pay passenger compensation. Read that sentence again for a moment. Bailiffs boarded a commercial passenger aircraft because the airline had ignored a court judgment. In almost any other industry that would have dominated the headlines for weeks and prompted serious questions about corporate governance. In aviation it barely caused a ripple before everyone quietly moved on.

The European Union has also begun strengthening passenger protections after more than a decade of negotiations over reforming EU261. The revised framework improves transparency around fares and ancillary charges, requires airlines to seat children under fourteen with an accompanying adult free of charge, strengthens rerouting obligations by requiring airlines to find alternative transport more quickly, gives passengers clearer information about how to claim compensation and introduces tighter deadlines for airlines to respond to claims. Both the UK and the EU are beginning to acknowledge what passengers have been saying for years: existing rights mean very little if airlines know they are unlikely to face meaningful consequences for ignoring them.

Encouraging though these developments are, they still don’t go nearly far enough. Too much of the current regulatory approach remains reactive instead of preventative, stepping in only after thousands of passengers have already suffered the consequences. In effect, this is just more of the same.

Airlines know they can still carry on behaving as they like, breaking the law, ignoring any regulatory demands and just see any fines as an acceptable part of doing business.

Encouraging though these developments are, they still do not go nearly far enough. They remain largely reactive instead of preventative, stepping in only after thousands of passengers have already suffered the consequences of airline misconduct. By the time an investigation is launched, a report is published or an enforcement notice is issued, the holidays have already been ruined, the money has already been lost and the stress has already been endured. Regulators congratulate themselves for finally taking action, airlines issue carefully worded statements promising to do better and the industry quietly moves on. In effect, it is simply more of the same.

The reason this cycle never seems to end is because the incentives have never really changed. Airlines still know they can deny compensation, delay refunds, ignore regulatory demands and force passengers through deliberately exhausting complaints procedures because, in purely commercial terms, doing so is often more profitable than complying with the law in the first place. Even when regulators eventually intervene, financial penalties are frequently absorbed as another operating expense rather than feared as a genuine punishment. That is not accountability. It is a business model. If breaking the rules remains cheaper than following them, there should be little surprise when some airlines continue making exactly the same calculation.

That entire incentive structure needs turning on its head. Passenger rights should be every bit as robust, enforceable and automatic as they are in any other consumer industry. If a flight qualifies for compensation, the airline should pay it automatically. If an airline believes compensation is not due, the burden should rest on the airline to demonstrate why, not on an ordinary passenger to spend months proving that rights they already possess should actually be honoured. Airlines know when flights have been delayed, cancelled or overbooked. They already hold every piece of operational data needed to determine eligibility. There is no legitimate reason why passengers should have to become amateur lawyers simply to recover money that was theirs from the moment the disruption occurred. The fact that an entire claims industry has emerged simply to force airlines to honour existing passenger rights should embarrass both the industry and the regulators responsible for overseeing it.

Enforcement also needs to become dramatically more ambitious. Airlines that repeatedly ignore statutory obligations should not simply receive larger fines; the fines themselves should be so steep it hurts them, and then they should face progressively more severe consequences every time they demonstrate that consumer law is something they can choose whether or not to follow. Financial penalties should increase to the point where persistent non-compliance genuinely threatens bankruptcy, because until breaking the rules becomes more expensive than obeying them, behaviour will never fundamentally change. If an airline repeatedly demonstrates contempt for passenger rights, systematically ignores regulatory action or develops a corporate culture built around avoiding its legal obligations, there should eventually come a point where its licence to operate is placed at risk. That may sound harsh, but aviation is a licensed industry entrusted with transporting millions of people every year. If repeated ethical and operational failures can ultimately cost professionals in healthcare, finance or law the right to practise, there is no convincing reason why airlines should enjoy a lower standard of accountability.

The imbalance of power between airlines and passengers also needs addressing. Throughout this article I have argued that airlines have gradually accumulated far too much authority over their customers, not simply operationally but commercially and, at times, culturally and legally too. Airlines should never be allowed to justify ignoring basic human rights or medical ethics. Legitimate authority to operate an aircraft safely is important, but that does not mean that authority is absolute or deserves no scrutiny. Airlines should no longer enjoy what often feels like carte blanche to dictate the terms of every disagreement, rely on broad legal protections unavailable to almost any other private business or expect passengers to simply accept decisions because challenging them in the moment is practically impossible. Once safety ceases to be the issue, airlines should be subject to exactly the same standards of consumer protection, contractual fairness and legal accountability as every other company.

That should also mean challenging long-established practices that have simply become accepted because they have existed for decades. Deliberately selling more seats than exist on an aircraft should not be regarded as an unfortunate reality of modern aviation; it should be prohibited. If any other business knowingly sold the same product to multiple customers despite possessing only one, nobody would defend it as an accepted commercial practice. It would be fraud. Likewise, the relentless drive to reduce seat pitch, cram ever more passengers into increasingly uncomfortable cabins and then charge premium prices simply to restore the legroom that used to be standard deserves far greater regulatory attention than it currently receives. Regulators already specify detailed engineering and safety requirements for aircraft cabins. Establishing minimum standards for passenger space, transparent pricing and basic consumer dignity is hardly an impossible leap.

Regulators themselves, however, cannot be allowed to escape responsibility either. It is all very well demanding higher standards from airlines, but what happens when the organisations specifically created to protect passengers repeatedly fail to do so? Too often the answer has been nothing. Enforcement arrives years after the damage has been done, obvious patterns of misconduct are allowed to continue unchecked and passengers are left to fight multinational corporations largely on their own. Even where passengers succeed in court, the process is often so expensive, time-consuming and intimidating that many simply give up long before reaching that point. Consumer protection should never depend upon whether an ordinary traveller has the determination, financial resources or legal knowledge to outlast a multinational airline.

To be fair, the Civil Aviation Authority has argued that it needs stronger enforcement powers, including the ability to impose direct financial penalties on airlines that repeatedly fail passengers. If additional powers genuinely improve consumer protection, then they should absolutely be granted. But the CAA is the Civil Aviation Authority. The clue is in the name. They already possess significant authority, considerable influence and a statutory responsibility to champion passenger rights. They should use them. If regulators repeatedly fail to enforce existing legislation, ignore persistent abuses or allow unlawful practices to continue unchecked, they too should be subject to independent scrutiny and meaningful accountability. A regulator that consistently fails to regulate is failing in the very purpose for which it exists.

None of this is about demanding perfection from an industry operating in a complex environment. Flights will always be disrupted by weather, aircraft will always suffer technical faults and operational problems will always arise. Those things are inevitable. The true test of an airline has never been whether things occasionally go wrong; it is how the airline behaves afterwards. Does it accept responsibility, comply willingly with its legal obligations and treat passengers with honesty and respect, or does it deny, delay, deflect and gamble that enough people will simply give up before justice catches up with it?

If recent enforcement action genuinely marks the beginning of a new era, then it should be welcomed. But nobody should mistake these first tentative steps for the finish line. The airline industry has spent decades convincing itself that it can operate by a different set of rules to almost every other business. It is time that illusion came to an end. Respect is not earned through market dominance, legal protections or operational authority. It is earned by treating customers fairly, accepting responsibility when things go wrong and understanding that no private company, however large or influential, should ever be above the law.

Airlines Are Not Above The Law

Airlines like to remind us that flying is a privilege. In reality, it is a service. A service that passengers pay for, often at considerable expense, and one that comes with both contractual and legal obligations. Airlines are not doing anyone a favour by honouring those obligations. They are simply delivering the product they sold.

For far too long, however, much of the industry has behaved as though those obligations were optional. Delays became someone else’s problem, compensation became a battle of attrition, customer service became an exercise in frustration and accountability became something to avoid rather than embrace. When challenged, too many airlines fell back on the same attitude that has become all too familiar over the years: trust us, don’t question us and accept whatever we decide because there is very little you can do about it.

That culture has been allowed to develop because the consequences have never been severe enough to change it. Time and again airlines have shown that if ignoring passengers’ rights is cheaper than respecting them, many will simply absorb the occasional fine, legal claim or bad headline as another cost of doing business. Until that calculation changes, the behaviour will not.

The encouraging news is that regulators finally appear to be waking up to the problem, but this cannot become another cycle of strongly worded reports, promises of reform and then years of inaction while passengers continue fighting the same battles. Airlines should fear ignoring consumer law far more than they fear paying compensation, because one is a choice and the other is the consequence of failing to deliver the service they promised.

Most importantly of all, we cannot simply develop collective amnesia about the lessons of recent years. Whether your concern is customer rights, regulatory failure or the willingness of powerful institutions to exercise extraordinary authority over ordinary people, accountability only matters if it survives beyond the crisis that exposed the problem in the first place. If we quietly forget what happened the moment normality returns, we simply invite the same mistakes to be repeated the next time circumstances become difficult.

Airlines occupy a unique position. They transport millions of people across the world every day, and with that comes significant operational authority and enormous public trust. Those are responsibilities, not privileges. The greater the authority an organisation exercises over its customers, the greater the scrutiny and accountability it should expect in return.

It is time the airline industry remembered a very simple truth.

It is not above the law. It is not above its customers. And it should never again be allowed to behave as though it is.