In-flight sexual assault is a federal felony. It's also chronically underreported, and no agency on earth tracks it comprehensively.

It usually starts the same way. A long flight, a dimmed cabin, a woman asleep in a window or middle seat, a blanket pulled up around her. She wakes to find a stranger's hands where they don't belong. In 2023 alone, the FBI opened 96 investigations into exactly this. Agents describe the pattern as strikingly consistent, and they've said openly that the true number is almost certainly higher, since there's no single agency anywhere in the world responsible for counting these incidents.

The people closest to it see it constantly. In a survey conducted for Congress, one in five flight attendants said they'd personally handled a report of one passenger sexually assaulting another mid-flight, and law enforcement was only called in about half of those cases. This isn't a rare, freak occurrence at 36,000 feet. What's missing isn't awareness inside the industry. It's accountability.

Sources: FBI, Los Angeles Field Office; Association of Flight Attendants-CWA congressional survey

The law already agrees with us. It just hasn't caught up yet.

To recover anything under the Montreal Convention, a passenger has to prove "bodily injury" from an "accident" onboard. Courts have agreed a sexual assault can count as an accident. What they haven't agreed on is whether trauma without a visible physical wound counts as injury, and that's precisely what most groping and harassment cases look like. She then has exactly two years to file, no extensions, no exceptions.

FlySafe is a nonprofit organization working to reform the Montreal Convention, the international law that leaves too many women without recourse after being harmed while traveling. We fund the legal work, fact-checking, and advocacy behind that reform, and we connect women to the resources and support they need in the meantime.

Three goals. One fight.

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