The man allegedly at the centre of the Malaysia Airlines bomb scare over Victoria could face a lengthy jail term, but it will largely be up to individual airlines to decide if he can board an aircraft again.
The 25-year-old is charged with endangering the safety of an aircraft and making threats – each carry a maximum penalty of 10 years jail. However, when he is released from custody, airlines will be the ones to decide if he is safe to fly.
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MH128 passengers waited for about 90 minutes before police boarded their Malaysia-bound flight to arrest a difficult passenger, but why?
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A number of federal and state agencies can place "travel alerts" on individuals, but there is no official list of people deemed too risky to fly based on either past criminal activity or previous behaviour in the sky.
Instead, airlines maintain private "no-fly" lists.
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Airlines' security teams decide whether to ban passengers who have been disruptive or dangerous, while their medical teams are consulted on bans when the passenger's behaviour was linked to mental illness, according to industry sources. Bans can range from less than 24 hours up to life.
Airline security teams sometimes pass information to each other informally about passengers who may pose a risk, sources said.
This commonly occurs when an airline refuses to board an intoxicated passenger, but can also happen if a passenger has been involved in a more serious incident.
The Australia Federal Police has a system that alerts it when individuals of interest try to travel into or out of Australia, allowing them to intercept those passengers, and also tips off airlines informally when it believes someone should be added to a carrier's no-fly list, it is understood.
Police can stop individuals from flying domestically only by obtaining court-imposed sanctions.
The Sri Lankan national allegedly involved in Wednesday night's incident, who was in Australia on a student visa, was discharged from a Melbourne psychological facility a day earlier and bought his ticket on the flight that day.
That raised questions about whether he should have faced extra scrutiny before flying.
Federal Infrastructure Minister Darren Chester did not rule out the idea of a system to flag passengers with mental illnesses severe enough to make them a safety risk, saying there was a precedent in the government's recently announced scheme to ban sex offenders from international travel.
Geoffrey Askew, a former Qantas executive responsible for security and now a safety consultant, said it was uncommon for people with a mental illness to cause safety scares and that moves for airlines to share that type of information would be risky.
"The only reason an airline would be aware of it is because of some prior behaviour by that same person on a previous flight," Mr Askew said.
"The privacy issues here are obviously paramount; people with mental illness' information is not made available to the industry, nor will it ever be, nor should it be."
Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton said such a system would disincentivise medical treatment.
"It can act as an agent against people coming forward if they think 'If I come forward, I'm going to be on some black-ban travel list and I'll never leave the country and I'll never be able to travel," he said.