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WHY BRITONS ARE ADDICTED TO BOOZING IN THE AIR

 * admin
 * August 31, 2024
 * News

Ryanair’s boss wants passengers limited to two drinks to combat drunken
disorder, but who’s to blame for the rowdy behaviour?

“Opening an aeroplane door mid-flight is actually extremely hard,” says Emirates
cabin crew member Sarah*. “It’s highly pressurised at that height. But not when
you’re descending – that’s when it becomes really dangerous.”
She’s recounting the moment when, on a recent nine-hour flight from Cape Town,
her team had to forcibly restrain an “extremely drunk” passenger when he made a
run to open the door as they came into land in Dubai.
He’d become increasingly inebriated after secretly drinking out of a bottle of
duty-free booze in his bag; the crew finally had to step in when he began
inappropriately touching a woman sitting next to him. 
It did not calm matters. “He started going nuts,” says Sarah, as he launched
into a fight with a fellow passenger, before bragging that he could drink
“whenever I want and how I want” and threatening to jump off the plane if they
didn’t let him.
To the utter shock of passengers, he tried to carry out his threat. Fortunately,
quick-witted staff managed to stop him. He was held until police arrested him on
arrival.
The incident sounds like a scene from a Hollywood comedy – The Hangover, say, or
Bridesmaids – but sadly it is becoming an all too familiar problem for pilots
and air crew bussing businessmen, families, and holidaymakers across the skies.
It has led this week to Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary calling for a two drinks
per passenger limit at airport bars to combat drunken disorder on flights and at
airports. Booze-fuelled violence has surged this summer, he revealed, with
attacks on both cabin crew and fellow passengers now occurring on a weekly
basis.
He blames a combination of alcohol with “powder and tablets”. “We don’t want to
begrudge people having a drink,” he told The Telegraph. “But we don’t allow
people to drink-drive – yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000 feet.”
It’s a view echoed by many across the industry. “I don’t often agree with
Michael, as one of his former pilots, but he does speak some sense,” says former
Ryanair captain Brian Smith, who left the company earlier this year. 
He and his co-pilots once had to band together like nightclub bouncers ready to
fend off an intoxicated father, who had spent the flight shouting at his own
family and was given a formal warning. 
It was the same for flight attendants, he said, despite them often being only
“slim, young girls”. “They have to be everything to everybody – first aiders,
compassionate, and to a couple [of passengers] bouncers as well.”
It’s a peculiarly British problem. In April, the boss of Turkish-German budget
airline SunExpress recently branded British travellers “more high-spend, more
hedonistic”. Max Kownatzki recently revealed how holidaymakers on a flight out
of the UK had drunk the entire stock of booze for a four-hour flight to Turkey
in the space of just 25 minutes. 
The biggest problem routes are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the holiday charters and
night flights to Ibiza, Majorca and the Costas in the heat of summer, says
Smith. He says drunken incidents are “very common,” estimating they were likely
happening across the airlines during peak season “a dozen times a week at
least”. 
“Some locations are worse than others – the Manchester and Glasgow departures
were particularly bad,” adds Smith, who in his 25 years as a pilot has also
worked with First Choice and Emirates. “I don’t want to point the finger at
people regionally…but that is true you know.”
Yet the worst offenders are not who you might suspect. “Stags and hens do get
inebriated but they’re generally more buoyant than fighting and shouting. You
often find it’s actually the couples. When one or both of them have been
drinking hard, quite often this undercurrent of what was pissing them off
earlier comes out.”
Nearly two in three Britons travelling by air have had to deal in some way with
a drunk passenger, according to a 2020 report by the Institute of Alcohol
Studies, with over half of those surveyed believing excessive boozing on planes
was a “serious problem”. 
And figures suggest it’s only getting worse. In 2021, there was a
record-breaking one unruly incident for every 835 flights, according to the
International Air Travel Association (IATA). By the following year this had
increased to one in 568 – a 47 per cent increase. 
O’Leary squarely points the blame at airports themselves, rather than the
airlines. “People are waiting around at airports and they keep lorrying alcohol
into them,” he said. “Most of our passengers show up an hour before departure.
That’s sufficient for two drinks. But if your flight is delayed by two or three
hours you can’t be guzzling five, six, eight, ten pints of beer. Go and have a
coffee or a cup of tea. It’s not an alcoholics’ outing.”
“It’s certainly a growing problem,” says former British Airways pilot Nick
Eades, the world’s longest-serving Boeing 747 captain, who said he had mostly
seen it among British passengers. “It’s this ‘get on the plane, go somewhere and
get drunk’ culture, which the French don’t have, the Italians don’t have, and
most of our European neighbours don’t seem to have.
“It’s not so much to do with flying, it’s just the chance to get drunk. You see
the same thing on Friday and Saturday night in British town centres, whereas
travelling around the world – and I’ve been to most countries, even some of the
most scary ones – you just don’t, or at least very rarely.”
“When I was younger, and you went flying, you would dress up and put a shirt and
tie on,” adds Eades, who remembers innumerable instances of drunk and disorderly
passengers. “Now, the flights are so cheap and all the airports want to do is
get you into the bar and encourage you to drink excessively.” 
Indeed, travelling drinkers are so committed to their cause, that airport
watering holes are booming while British pubs are in decline. In fact, the
550-seater Windmill in Stansted Airport, which serves 1.2m customers per year,
was recently nicknamed “Britain’s busiest pub”. It takes around £800,000 per
week in peak season. 
Airport lounges are doing their bit to keep us tanked up too: alongside free
food, Heathrow’s Club Aspire lounge offers as much beer and wine as you can
stomach for just £40. The only extra charges are for sparkling wine and
cocktails.
The result is bleary-eyed passengers cramming into various drinking
establishments before the sun has even risen, making them feel more like a beer
festival than a departure lounge. 
And it’s unlikely to be the prices keeping the punters coming back for more. At
the Windmill, a pint of Doom Bar is £5.50 compared to just £1.99 five miles away
in the Bishop’s Stortford Wetherspoon. Instead, it appears to be what it stands
for. Forget drinking to combat any fears of flying: for two-thirds of Britons, a
drink at the airport is considered the official start of the holiday, according
to a survey by Heathrow Airport last year. 
“Airports don’t want to intervene as it’ll just mean a loss in revenue,” says
Smith. “They don’t care. They just want to sell you the booze and hand you over
to the airline.”
Wetherspoons boss Sir Tim Martin hit back yesterday at calls to restrict
drinking at airports, claiming that drunkenness is mostly a problem on planes
not at airports. Over the past month, just a third of sales at The Windmill came
from alcohol, he said, and he’d received “no complaints” from airports or
airlines about drunken passengers in recent years.
It’s hardly a surprising stance from Martin, who is in the business of making
money from his airport boozers. But Eades doesn’t hold much stock with O’Leary’s
solution either. “It’s just putting a sticking plaster over the problem. It
won’t make a huge amount of difference.” The problem in many cases is that
people are also bringing their own alcohol onto the plane and secretly drinking
it. “I’ve seen it where they’ll empty out their water bottles and fill it up
with duty-free vodka.”
To combat the scale of the problem, airport shops began putting booze in sealed
bags in 2019 in order to discourage customers from trying to drink it in the
air. A year before that, the travel industry launched a high-profile One Too
Many campaign highlighting potential punishments for alcohol-induced bad
behaviour in the cabin.  
The punishments are strict: a convicted passenger can face a two-year prison
sentence and a £5,000 fine for being drunk on a plane under UK law. If passenger
or aircraft safety is compromised, prison time could stretch to five years and,
if the plane was forced to divert, the disruptive passenger could be held liable
for the airline’s costs, which can be as high as £80,000. 
Sinead Quinn, who is responsible for the training of Ryanair’s 14,000 cabin
crew, said the company was having to resort to passenger bans and increasingly
sharing information on problem flyers with peers. She agrees that “the UK is
most challenging, the regions in particular. But there’s no particular profile.
You have groups of young people, but it can be families and those you least
expect.”
Sarah is certainly keen for a swift solution. Emirates staff are dealing with
overly drunk passengers causing mayhem on board at least once a week, she said. 
Until then, however, it appears she’ll have to hope some drunk passengers are as
easy to calm down as one recent woman on a flight to Australia. Early into the
journey the woman had become so drunk at the bar onboard she started taking all
her clothes off. Thankfully, after managing to contain her, the passenger passed
out for the rest of the flight.
*Name has been changed 
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