A bleary-eyed pint at an airport bar before an early morning flight is a travel tradition for many Britons, but it may become a thing of the past if Ryanair’s boss, Michael O’Leary, gets his way.
The airline’s chief executive, no stranger to courting controversy, has said airports should be banned from serving alcohol to passengers before early flights in order to reduce the number of disruptive passengers on planes.
O’Leary said his airline was having to divert an average of nearly one flight a day because of bad behaviour onboard, up from one a week 10 years ago.
In an interview with the Times, O’Leary said: “It’s becoming a real challenge for all airlines. I fail to understand why anybody in airport bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning. Who needs to be drinking beer at that time?”
Airport bars in the UK are not required to follow restrictions on opening hours that apply to other venues selling alcohol. O’Leary said: “There should be no alcohol served at airports outside [those] licensing hours.”
He said Ryanair rarely served more than two drinks to a passenger and called for a two-drink limit to be introduced at airports as well. He did not say whether he would restrict the times that alcohol is served on Ryanair flights.
“We are reasonably responsible, but the ones who are not responsible, the ones who are profiteering off it, are the airports who have these bars open at five or six o’clock in the morning and during delays are quite happy to send these people as much alcohol as they want because they know they’re going to export the problem to the airlines,” he said.
Being drunk on a plane is a criminal offence and can be punished by a fine of up to £5,000 and two years’ imprisonment.
Ryanair announced in January last year that it had started taking legal action against disruptive passengers to recover losses when they forced a flight to be diverted.
It said it had filed legal proceedings against a passenger in Ireland to seek €15,000 (£12,500) in damages related to a flight from Dublin to Lanzarote.
The budget airline Jet2 called last week for the establishment of a national database so airlines could work together to ban disruptive passengers.
