Europe’s Ryanair is calling for airports to impose a two-drink limit on passenger alcohol consumption to reduce inflight incidents that lead to flight diversions.
Here’s a group of women pregaming at airport security, because they can’t bring their own booze into the airport.
Here’s a passenger with their own bottle of wine on short Charlotte – Miami flight.
Credit: R. Tedrow, Used With Permission
And here a drunk Russian passenger attacks cabin crew, gets taken into custody but tears apart the flexcuffs, and tries to smash a plane window.
Aeroflot plane Dubai-Moscow had to make an emergency landing in Baku because of an inadequate Russopithecus in the cabin. According to passengers, at first he was calm… But suddenly a demon entered him, he began to hit the porthole and howled in pain “KHOHLYYYYYYYY”,… pic.twitter.com/wcWaywwV0x
— Malinda (@TreasChest) December 28, 2024
Yet it’s an excruciatingly small percentage of passengers who create problems, and most who drink in airports order a single drink and don’t finish it. The sort of systems airports would have to build to track consumption by passenger across their journey would be incredibly intrusive – for everyone – as well as cumbersome and costly. Yet the problem is most easily addressed by the airlines themselves.
- Airport alcohol sales compete with onboard alcohol sales. Ryanair isn’t proposing that they stop selling alcohol only that airports reduce their own sales.
- Number of drinks isn’t the issue in any case. Passengers are in the airport for varying lengths of time. Passengers are different in weight and tolerance. And they drink difference things with varying alcohol content. Two may be a lot to down as you run through security to your gate, not so much with a six hour layover.
- Airlines have been cutting airport staffing. Gate agents just don’t have the time to monitor passengers in the boarding gate and during the boarding process to identify those who may be under the influence. Ryanair is deflecting responsibility for its own role here in allowing passengers who shouldn’t fly onto its aircraft.
- In fact, the issue with Ryanair is greater than most airlines because gate agents have more enforcement to do and more fees to extract, which trump in importance compared to evaluated passengers.
- Two drinks at the airport plus drinks on board is certainly enough for many people to get obnoxiously drunk, if that’s their predisposition.
Is it even practical to limit alcohol purchases by passenger in an airport? It would be one thing to say each vendor could only sell two drinks to each person. But that wouldn’t accomplish much. Most airports have plenty of different places to drink.
So Ryanair suggests using a boarding pass to track people, although it’s underspecified exactly how this would work. Does each boarding pass come with drink tickets? And is each drink ticket tracked electronically in a central database (because passengers can reprint their boarding pass, or screen shot it with those coupons intact)?
And if each boarding pass is ‘worth’ two drink purchases, it seems like there’s now a market value in boarding passes. If you’re not a drinker you can sell the right to your drinks (or to your second drink if you’re only buying one) to those who want more than two. Are you going to criminalize this? Because if not, then two drink chits isn’t going to be a binding constraint for the small percentage of passengers that want more than two.
Ultimately it turns out that drinking on planes is worse for you than drinking in airports. One study finds that sleeping inflight after drinking increased heart rates and reduced blood oxygen levels, increasing risk of heart attack.
Ryanair can (1) keep visibly intoxicated people off its flights, if they wish (they just choose not to invest in doing so), and they can (2) stop selling alcohol inflight, so passengers don’t become more inebriated (they just choose not to give up that revenue).
The call to have airports create new systems to track and limit drinking is a complete ruse, a marketing ploy, just like the airline’s CEO Michael O’Leary has been talking up for the past 20 years charging to use the lavatory; making passengers stand inflight; and giving away all tickets free while earning revenue from them through inflight gambling. None of this ever happens.
Meanwhile the European Commission considers current rules sufficient so this is a complete non-starter.
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