Passengers grabbing carry-on bags during airplane evacuations are raising safety concerns.
There have been a number of aircraft evacuations recently, most recently on May 8, when a Frontier Airlines flight aborted takeoff at Denver International Airport after striking and killing a trespasser on the runway. Early eyewitness accounts of the event confirmed that during the evacuation, passengers slowed it by collecting their carry-on bags.
This has become a commonplace part of the discussion following almost all airliner evacuations. Although airline manuals have long directed flight attendants to command passengers to “Leave everything!” during an evacuation, few listen.
Passengers were seen evacuating with their carry-ons after a Delta Air Lines regional jet crash-landed on the runway at Toronto in February 2025; just a few months later, passengers evacuated with their bags from an American Airlines jet in Denver. In September 2025, the FAA recommended that “operators should evaluate their emergency evacuation procedures, training, and emergency announcements and commands to address passenger non-compliance, particularly in relation to carry-on item retrieval.”
Airlines have taken notice. United Airlines now reminds passengers not to evacuate with their bags during pre-flight safety briefings, and again before landing. Some airlines have consulted psychologists to understand what drives passengers to risk their lives for their belongings during an evacuation.
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As part of the conversation, many frequent travelers have gamed out escape scenarios in their own heads—often wondering, “What would I do if I were in an evacuation, and passengers in front of me were slowing the process to get their bags?”
An obvious answer might be to resort to pushing and shoving, but this can also slow an evacuation. But what’s a passenger’s liability for actions they take during an evacuation? If they take a bag from a passenger and throw it aside, can the passenger sue them for property damage? If they shove past a passenger struggling with their bags and injure them in the process, are they liable for the injury?
David Katzman, a senior partner at Katzman, Lampert, and Stoll, a law firm specializing in aviation accident litigation, notes that the environment of an aircraft evacuation is generally viewed differently.
“Generally speaking, these situations are extremely fact-specific,” Katzman told Fodor’s. “Courts tend to evaluate evacuation behavior in the context of an emergency rather than through the lens of ordinary day-to-day conduct.”
Katzman goes on to say he’s not aware of any court cases specifically centered on passengers being held liable to one another during aircraft evacuations—either in situations where passengers ignored crew instructions to collect their bags, or behaved in a way that impeded the evacuation or caused injuries. “Conditions inside an evacuating aircraft can be chaotic, loud, confusing, and psychologically intense. Actions that may look questionable afterward can feel very different inside the cabin itself.”
The courts, he says, tend to be understanding that emergency situations are atypical and tend to spur atypical behavior. “If someone shoved past another passenger, damaged property, or physically intervened because they believed the evacuation was being impeded, the question would typically be whether those actions were reasonable in a rapidly evolving emergency environment.”
During the evacuation of Frontier Airlines Flight 4345, a Reddit poster who purported to be a passenger on the aircraft said that she didn’t take any of her own carry-ons, but others did, slowing the evacuation. At the time of her post, she hadn’t been able to recover her luggage from the aircraft after several days, and had encountered significant difficulty when she addressed the issue with Frontier staff.
While passengers themselves are often not liable for their failure to follow crewmember instructions, airlines can be held liable if their crewmembers don’t conduct evacuations according to prescribed procedures. The NTSB is reviewing how Frontier Airlines conducted the evacuation to determine whether to open a safety investigation.
Federal regulations require that airlines be able to evacuate a full aircraft in 90 seconds or less with half the usable exits blocked. When new aircraft configurations enter service, airlines must demonstrate they can do so during tests with volunteer passengers, but there are caveats. Participants in the test know they’re about to evacuate, and the tests are conducted entirely with able-bodied adults and no bags, pets, or service animals.
Calls have grown in Congress for the FAA to reassess how the tests are conducted, particularly following the crash of a Japanese jetliner in Tokyo in 2024. That aircraft took 18 minutes to evacuate through three of the eight exits—and those passengers evacuated almost entirely without hand luggage. In May, 2024, Congress passed the Emergency Vacating of Aircraft Cabin (EVAC) Act, which required the FAA to reassess standards and testing for aircraft evacuations, but the process is still in the evaluation phase.
Katzman also cautions against jumping to conclusions soon after an accident, noting that a full picture of an evacuation only comes after an exhaustive investigation with perspectives from multiple witnesses and data sources. “In aviation events, the factual picture often changes significantly once investigators reconstruct the sequence more carefully.”
