So-called "air rage," of course, is the ultimate manifestation of passenger hostility. To date I have never done an Air Rage column (I'm going with caps from here on), though the issue, if for nothing more than its raw entertainment value, might beg one.

Reading through the vast docket of Air Rage incidents, the phenomenon seems, at times, almost a caricature of aggression. The more flagrant examples read like the choreographed ultra-violence of a WWF Smackdown. A vodka bottle broken over the head of an attendant and raked across her back; another whose face is slammed against a seat; a 767 forced to put down in Newfoundland where an inebriated rider, having pummeled his seatmates and threatened to kick out a window, is hauled away by Mounties (and later presented with a bill for the $35,000 in diversionary fuel costs).

Air Rage has spawned its own cult of victims, activists and researchers. Take a look at the Skyrage Foundation, or check out airrage.org. While its determinants and solutions might seem patently obvious to some, that hasn't stopped at least two books from attempting to deconstruct an Air Rage psychology. Argentinean author Guillermo Bruno gives us "Unexpected Behavior in International Commercial Air Transport Passengers." Says Bruno: "It is only through an interdisciplinary approach to this phenomenon allowing us to understand and attack the causes that we will succeed in eradicating these undesired events."

If you're not feeling interdisciplinary, try Anonymous, Anonymous, and Andrew R. Thomas, the writers of "Air Rage: Crisis in the Skies." That's correct, two anonymouses contributing to the same work. Now, analyzing the causes and effects of airborne assault is not akin to divulging state secrets, and I can't help but wonder what the secrecy is for. Granted I should read the book before judging it, but I'm led to think this particular investigation is more sensationalist than substantive.

On that note, our old friend Diana Fairechild, retired stewardess and author of "Jet Smarter," has tackled the matter as well. Fairechild blames Air Rage on "oxygen deprivation." She specifies the work of Vincent Mark, M.D., an "environmental physician" in Santa Cruz, Calif., who explains: "Curtailment of fresh air in airplanes can be causing deficient oxygen in the brains of passengers, and this often makes people act belligerent, even crazy."

We've been over this before, but for the record we'll cover it again: Cabin altitude in a typical jet is held at around 8,000 feet above sea level. That's slightly higher than the elevation of Mexico City. Should we theorize that altitude, not squalor and destitution, is accountable for the extraordinary crime rate in the world's most populous city? I am uncertain at what altitude, if any, people begin to go berserk, and my flight training tells me that headaches, nausea and fatigue are the more telltale symptoms of hypoxia. Though, adds the good doctor from Santa Cruz, "I'm positive about this."

The tendency here, as with any curious societal anomaly, is to engage a simple problem through needless layers of nonsense, pop psychology and overly academic scrutiny. A year 2000 report from London Guildhall University, "Managing Disruptive Passengers: a Survey of the World's Airlines," lists alcohol and "personality of the passenger" as the most commonly cited contributing factors in, respectively, 88 percent and 81 percent of violent episodes. No offense to anybody's devotion to scholarly inquisition or the scientific process itself, but how many research hours did the professors exhaust before concluding that excessive amounts of liquor served to habitually belligerent people in an overcrowded airliner is a recipe for trouble?

The statistical wild card is the strangely aberrant behavior demonstrated time to time by hitherto reasonable people. Reasonable drunk people, I should qualify, as alcohol remains a factor, but most of us do not turn into raging lunatics when inebriated. The most notorious and well-publicized of such cases was that of Gerard Finneran, the man who, on a United Airlines jet in 1996, harassed an attendant before defecating on a galley cart. A gang member on a tequila binge? No, Finneran was a Connecticut businessman on his way home from Buenos Aires, Argentina, sitting in first class.

Guitarist Peter Buck of the band REM was arrested after a fit of wilding on a British Airways flight between Seattle and London. Buck, also in first class and also having consumed a hefty snootful, allegedly upended a food cart, swore at the captain and splattered cabin staff with yogurt. (Buck was responding to another passenger's taunt of, "How come you pretentious bores never wrote a single decent song after the 'Reckoning' album in 1984?" OK, I made that part up, but it needed to be said.)

Lastly are the more rare -- and more dangerous -- aggressions of those sober but mentally unstable. Five years ago, a deranged 28-year-old man forced his way into the cockpit of an All Nippon Airways 747 carrying 503 people and stabbed the captain to death with an 8-inch knife. In August 2000, Jonathan Burton, a teenager from Las Vegas, was beaten and fatally suffocated by passengers after inexplicably attempting to storm the cockpit during a Southwest Airlines flight. In 1999 a man suffering from encephalitis forced his way into the cockpit of an Alaska Airlines jet, and in 2001 a deranged passenger barged onto the flight deck of an American Airlines 767 and attempted to seize the controls.

In the vast majority of examples, however, it's more predictable: A predisposition for hostility provides the needed tinder; crowds, delays, and the usual pains of travel are the match; alcohol the gasoline.

Reinforced cockpit doors are the best protection against crazed intruders, while it shouldn't startle us that the cramped, tense quarters of a pressurized fuselage are apt to push certain individuals over the edge. Air travel -- mysterious, stressful, high-profile -- will always draw its share of deviants and attention seekers, whether terrorists or the mentally unsound.

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