Ryanair boss demands airport booze crackdown amid onboard incidents
Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary has requested that airport staff monitor passengers’ drinking limits while warning that excessive boozing is fuelling a rise in alcohol-fuelled chaos on flights.
Last year, the UK Civil Aviation Authority recorded more than 1,000 serious disruptive passenger incidents on UK-linked aircraft, with cabin crew surveys indicating that alcohol intoxication was a leading trigger.
While there is no specific legal number of drinks that passengers can consume before jumping on a plane, airport bars are required to cut customers off if they believe they are intoxicated.
However, Irish billionaire O’Leary, who is the group CEO of Ryanair, wants airport staff to do so to stop drunk people from boarding his flights.
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“You should show your boarding pass and that should limit you to two alcoholic drinks at whatever time of the day it is,” the businessman said during an interview with Sky Sports.
He continued: “We should limit people to two alcoholic drinks at an airport, that’s enough.
“When you have flight delays as we had during the summer, people are drinking too much at the airports. The airports don’t care, they’re happy to sell you the drink because they know then they’ll pass the problem on to the airlines.”
He insisted that because airport staff are failing to monitor customers, airlines are facing ‘real challenges with a dramatic growth in misbehaviour in passengers on board aircrafts’.
“Think of the number of passengers whose holidays and travel plans have been disrupted because some idiot can’t control themselves or won’t behave properly.
“I go back 20 years ago, we used to allow passengers to smoke on board aircraft. Now if somebody lit up on board an aircraft, it would be an international incident; you’d be arrested.
O’Leary continued: “Why do we allow drunk people to get on board aircraft?. It is not acceptable that we tolerate this misbehaviour and the authorities will not take any action. I divert an aircraft to an airport and the local police just want him or her back on the aircraft.”
The expert explained that airport locations and airport bar owners ‘expect the airlines to police’ alcohol intake, but pointed out that it’s usually ‘too late once they’re up in the air’.
He also added: “We need to tackle this – limit the drinks at airports. It’s a sensible thing to do. My view is that two will do.”
O’Leary has previously questioned why airport bars are licensed to sell alcohol and five and six o’clock in the morning, telling The Times: “I fail to understand why anybody in airport bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning. There should be no alcohol served at airports outside licensing hours.”
Ella Scott
