Aeroplane passengers should be restricted to two drinks at airports, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary has said.
Mr O’Leary said introducing alcohol limits at airports would help tackle a rise in disorder on flights.
Violent outbursts are occurring weekly due to alcohol, he said, especially when it is mixed with other substances.
“We don’t want to begrudge people having a drink,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
“But we don’t allow people to drink-drive, yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000ft.”
“But we don’t allow people to drink-drive, yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000ft.”
I didn’t realise you had to fly the plane yourself on Ryanair now. That’s one way to cut costs I guess…
That is uncomprehendingly stupid
The pilots can come under the influence of a good time
You say this, but have you ever tried to drive a car (sober) that is packed full of drunk people? It’s not easy, and they all might just get you pulled over anyway.
If they have a divider like the pilot does, then that’s kinda like driving a limo.
Found the drink addicted brit in the comments
Look at those downvotes lol, they hate being called out. Surprised they have the time to be on Lemmy instead of getting shitfaced and terrorising locals.
We can do that while we’re waiting at the bar for our next pint.
People are angry because of how absolutely shitty and evil ryan air is when they are abusing and stressing up their passengers with all their bullshit.
Otherwise airports are super calm (in the EU anyways).
Not in the US. I’d be fine with it but I don’t know how they’d enforce it. Most of the rowdy people would just get their friends to buy them drinks, or hop from bar to bar at the airport. I doubt they’d make people take a breathalyzer before serving them.
In EU they will not sell you almost anything already if you don’t show your boarding pass. It is very easy to keep a drink counter per passenger.
Where? I have never experienced this before.
Schiphol in the Netherlands, Milan and Rome in Italy, also in some airport in London as I recall.
But thinking about it, some things like food and water at the food court I might have never been asked.
Oh well.
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this while flying in the EU, and I’ve done my fair share of it, living here and all.
You only have to show your boarding pass for the tax breaks that come with traveling internationally.
Neither but here while there isn’t a ‘limit’ the flights only stock a set amount and flight crew can cut you off when they think you’ve had enough. I don’t think they give a shit if people manage to get drunk. I think largely the point is not having visibly drunk/disruptive people on planes or in airports. Which I kinda can understand.
Considering how shitty flying economy is in general, it seems like a 2 drink minimum is need to even tolerate it.
I always load up on weed edibles.
Bit dismayed people in comments are focused on Ryanair or air travel in general.
It’s never appropriate to be drunk and disorderly in public, especially if you are being a problem for staff. Doesn’t matter if you are frustrated, or delayed.
Agree, but it’s not on Ryanair to police that and should be at the discretion of the bar like it is everywhere else. If a bar overserves someone, fine them. If someone is unruly boarding or on a plane, either prevent them from boarding or ban them going forward and make the punishment hurt. There are plenty of people capable of drinking a handful of alcoholic beverages and functioning in public.
The problem is that generally people who have several drinks lose their common sense, and you can’t determine who will drink more and who will stop.
My father was an airline pilot, and often recounted stories of passengers who would become unruly and create safety concerns. He often used the expression “There are no road shoulders in the sky”, meaning that if there are problems you can’t simply pull over.
Also, most everybody who is drinking at an airport bar is boarding a flight, so if the drinker is drinking too much, they are going to bring the consequences of that over drinking on board.
Totally. I just don’t take any issue at all with a company calling out they wish there were less/no drunk folks on their flying metal tubes.
Unfortunately idiots ruin it for the rest of us, who can happily sit in their own seat with a buzz on
A crime has happened somewhere. Quick, call the CEO of an exploitative cost cutting company!
CEOs to the rescue again. Our heroes.
That don’t make no sense
Neither do double negatives
Fuck yeah
Agreed that being drunk and disorderly in public is wrong but airports are a powder keg that probably pushes people to drink more than normal considering passengers are treated like cattle in a highly restricted environment.
I hear you. I’ve felt it.
Not trying to argue, but I can’t accept shredding personal responsibility for ingesting chemicals. People are always responsible for what they consciously and freely put in their body, and are especially still responsible for how they act afterwards. I think it’s fair to say that no matter how bad, horrifically bad, an airport experience gets, there’s never justification to get rude or belligerent with folks just trying to do their jobs.
Every bartender in the U.S. can be fined/punished for over serving. This goes for the airports as well, and the flight attendants. The airlines have the right to turn away passengers who are to drunk as well. Depending on location drunk/disorderly in public can be prosecuted by the police who are stationed in the airports/terminals.
If all of those things are failing, maybe they should be addressing the bartenders/flight attendants who are already legally responsible. Turn them away at gate if you must. Making stupid public statements will never look good for your image when your own company is part of the process that is failing won’t do you any good
Reminder that he could be taking about his own business too, with an onboard 2 drink max.
Though I agree he’s taking about the airport too.
He’s clearly highlighting that the system isn’t working. Anyone who flies regularly can see evidence of that.
Don’t get me wrong, I like to drink, and even be drunk on occasion. But being so on group transit is not cool, and being so plus being aggressive towards staff or other travelers should come with a trip to the no fly list. I can understand why folks in the industry would want change.
I imagine being aggressive towards anyone would get you in trouble, maybe it’s just a U.S. thing, but getting in trouble on a plane is one of the last places Id want it. Even just the airport, it’s a confined area with minimal exits and lots of security/armed police/k9 units…
I can’t imagine if they land a plane somewhere because of you that you won’t hear the end of it. Maybe I’m just paranoid and it’s a lot more lax than I feel it is when I am there.
Is it the alcohol that causes people to be disorderly or all the BS that airlines throw at them. It’s equally as inappropriate to constantly prod people.
Drunk or not, it is never appropriate to harass staff or interfere with a flight
It’s also never appropriate to cancel flights then refuse to reimburse passengers for hotel stays due to said cancelation, lose luggage and refuse to refund or reimburses for the lost luggage.
Are you suggesting two things can’t be true?
I’m sorry dude but it’s entirely childish behavior (not you-you, the hypothetical behavior) to think that getting a run around / bad customer service permits you to get drunk and harass a flight attendant while they do their job. They didn’t fail to reimburse you, they clocked in and are trying to work their shift. How the fuck is it even in discussion that it’s ok to be rude/intimidating to someone in the working class?
Further, the other passengers also didn’t cause your booking woes, or lost luggage. Why should they be intimidated or disturbed by drunk and disorderly behavior?
Again I’m not saying “you” do this, I’m referring to a hypothetical drunken customer, even one who has suffered all of the bad things you mentioned.
Having an absolute shit day doesn’t permit getting drunk and impacting others
Are you suggesting two things can’t be true?
Nope, it’s why I used words like also and equally inappropriate.
Stopping everyone from having a few drinks so that the customers you shit on the most will obediently swallow all the shit you can shove down their throats is fixing a symptom not the cause.
It’s neither lol, it’s the people themselves.
Blame choosing to drink alcohol or fly a low cost carrier, but like…really it’s you. Sorry.
Screwing with 100s of people and then being surprised when one lashed out is impressively naive.
Ryan Air: No, it’s the airports that are wrong.
“But we don’t allow people to drink-drive, yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000ft.”
Aaah, so the problem is drunk pilots. I can get behind a two-drink maximum for flying a plane. Although, in “Flight” the guy flew a plane upside down hammered…so maybe it should be a two-drink minimum to get maximum innovation.
ETA: I prob should have added /s
The false equivalence in the article is frustrating. We don’t allow people to drink and drive, but we do allow people to drink and ride. Contextually, I think the article is referring to drunk passengers being unruly, not pilots. If they are actually talking about pilots then it should be a 0 drink limit before a flight. Just punish the disorderly drunks, and let the rest of the adults, adult.
Pilots already are forbidden from drinking before flights. I seem to recall a very strict policy about not drinking for at least 24 hours before a flight.
Generally there are no pilots who drink before a flight. All airline carry out spot tests, and pilots who fail will at the very least be suspended. Many airline have a zero tolerance policy, and will kick a pilot out if they test positive. Too high a risk for most pilots
That’s their point, no drunk drivers in the issue, so why was he discussing them?
If he wants us to start arresting sober drivers for driving drunk people home, that’s another topic he should address separately.
Don’t think he’s going to get very far with that one, as if you made such a law, you would discourage people from driving intoxicated people home, thereby increasing drunk drivers on the road, and putting more people at risk.
Lol, maybe if conditions didn’t get so shit in airports, fewer would crack
Let’s be honest. Any social norms about when drinking is socially acceptable go out the window at airports. It’s been that way as long as I can remember. But Ryan Air/Spirit/frontier passengers all kind of self select for having a miserable experience so I don’t blame them for trying to numb the pain.
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Ryanair boss prolly uses private jet with open bar and skips the lines at the airport
If he does, I assume that he’s also not creating problems for other passengers.
I assume that he’s also not creating problems for other passengers.
RyanAir Boss
I bet he is, lol
The scale is too big for our peanut brain to process
Everyone with a private jet is worse than every drunk driver, if we just go by body count.
Me and my buddies were flying for vacation and we were in an airport that does that already. Somewhere in the southwest. So you just go to different airport bars every two drinks. Bar hopping isn’t that brazen a concept.
Unless they start tying your purchases to your plane ticket, this just seems like it will create more mobile drunks. It would be nice if they actually enforced policies against people too drunk being allowed to board a plane. I’ve seen people that were very visibly drunk and loud walk right on.
I guess telling a super drunk person they can’t board is more likely to instigate an scene than just waving them onboard and hoping they pass out. Aside from being annoyingly loud and drunk, I was only ever on one flight where someone became a problem, and basically they got into a drunken yelling match with someone next to them.
They got moved to a seat in the back and told if they didn’t calm down for the rest of the flight, the police would be waiting for him. He grumbled about it and passed out.
Yes, but its easier to deal with them on the ground than on the plane.
I get that Lemmy’s kneejerk reaction is naturally that the big corporation’s CEO is wrong and evil (he IS an asshole, at least), but drunk passengers on planes is an actual issue.
I have a couple of close relatives who’ve worked as air hostesses for Ryanair for years, and they mostly like the job except for summer flights from a specific European island country in which there’s a big tradition of drinking a lot and big groups of men doing “guy trips” to my country either for specific football games or for the beaches. These usually involve an almost permanent state of drunkenness, getting into fights with locals, trashing places.
O’Leary’s claim about inebriated people being hard to identify is partly bullshit from what my relatives tell me - they say that even when they can notice these groups are already drunk when boarding, Ryanair’s staff isn’t really comfortable policy wise in preventing them from boarding. Plane staff may refuse them alcohol on board but by then they’re usually already in a state of general lack of control. I assume the company doesn’t want to strenghten boarding rules in order not to lose these groups as customers, and staff gets shafted in the process. But these people shouldn’t be getting this drunk on a plane (or in general).
So maybe should just get comfortable policy-wise with turning away passengers fucked in passengers at the gate.
A two drink maximum doesn’t stop me from snorting a fistful of ket in the cab, getting 1-2 drinks after security, then going ballistic during the flight. Getting turned away at the gate because I’m obviously kholed does stop me though.
The thing that works the best might cost Ryanair some money though, and we obviously can’t have that, won’t someone please think of the profits?
Maybe you’re right. But hand waving the problem away with a knee jerk comment about how this is just a greedy CEO making up a problem that doesn’t actually exist doesn’t really add much to the discussion, and that was what my comment was addressing - the many comments pretending people flying drunk isn’t an actual issue but instead an excuse to justify Ryanair’s other shenanigans.
I was going to say that this sounds like a very UK specific issue.
What if we made airports less shit, so people weren’t spending so much time there, so people weren’t as stressed about missing their flights.
I have never been stressed to get on a bus, you roll up, put your shit in it, and get on. No massive waits, no massive security line, just get on and the bus leaves. We should make airports more like this.
Air travel is an infinitely more complex and involved problem to solve. There is no method of safely flying without going through mountains of bullshit first.
Return to trains!
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Much of the problem is related to TSA security theater. Cutting down on that alone would go a long way to improving the airport experience.
TSA (obviously) isn’t a thing outside of the US. Airport security does suck, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it is when flying to America.
If flying during a quiet period, with all the right checks and few queues you can get through security in 5 mins. When it really fucking sucks is when it’s busy, something airports should be able to deal with easily.
I’ve never had an issue with a non-torch zippo lighter when going through TSA checks. Ive never had an issue with a zippo while going through airport security checks in Japan. I’ve had non-torch zippos confiscated while going through all the following airports: LHR, CDG, FRA, HAM, BCN, MAD.
Most airport security is theater sure, but the most egregious theatrics haven’t been from the TSA in my experience.
People get pissed at airports because they’re on holiday mode with their mates, it’s part of the holiday to have some beers at the airport. It’s these kind of passengers that will be the issue, it’s nothing to do with the design of the airport.
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are you actually comparing an international flight with your local bus
Local flights have the same issues.
they truly do want to get you through the airport and to your destination as soon as possible, it would be more profitable for them
The airlines don’t run airports. Much of the slowdowns and hassles that occur there are caused by TSA security theater.
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That’s how it worked for decades before 9/11.
Yep! And the vast majority of the TSA changes since then don’t actually accomplish anything. There is a reason I continue using the phrase security theater.
Thousands Standing Around
What’s the surcharge he’s got in mind for this idea?
Mandatory breath tests at the gate with additional fees to pay for every 0.01% over a certain limit (but if you pay up front you can get as pissed as you like)
I never really understood why bars are so popular in airports.
Why anyone would want to get heavily drunk before flying is beyond me.
I can maybe see this being a thing way back during the prop days when engines were ridiculously loud and travel was very tiring, but those days have been long.
If you’re really that bored even with access to modern technology, you’re probably better off taking a sleeping pill.
Airport bars are crazy expensive too
I think drinking at airport bars can be fun. Everyone is on their way to somewhere else, no one is driving, so it can be really fun and chummy. Been drinking at an airport bar where a guy was buying everyone free rounds until the first person left for a flight. Pretty hilarious when a whole bar loudly booed a guy hustling off to his flight. 🤣
Yeah, I used to drink a lot but getting loaded before a flight just makes the whole ordeal so much less tolerable.
Yup. Getting drunk ON a plane is great. Getting drunk BEFORE a plane is no bueno.
As with any drinking occasion the trick is to hot that goldilocks zone where you are just drunk enough to enjoy yourself and then fall asleep in a few hours, but not so drunk you become belligerent and wake up feeling like shit
This is the take i understand the least that I’ve seen on Lemmy, airport bars are amongst the funnest places to drink, folks are either in vacation or work trip mode so for the most part everyone is loose and chill, nobody has to drive after, and as soon as I board and get to my seat I can instantly take a nap. I love an airport bar and I’ve had a bunch of really fun chats in them when I used to travel for work constantly
I dunno…maybe get people through the fucking airport before they can get that drunk
People are shit at flying period. You should have to pass a test before being sold an airline ticket. Nothing fancy. Just the basic do’s and don’ts of flying. Perhaps a psychological test for good measure and no skin walkers.
Do line up window middle isle front to back.
Don’t dick about in the aisle
Do sit down and stay seated
Don’t recline seat ever. You’re just fucking up the person behind you
Do leave both middle arm rests free for the poor bastard sitting there
Don’t leave the window shade open if the sun’s beating in.
No reclining? Fuck that shit-- most of my flights are long as hell and I’m not sitting ramrod straight for 14 hours. I can barely sleep as it is and those extra few degrees of tilt (plus a few beers) are the only thing that lets me get a couple hours passed out.
Where are you flying that you’re doing 14 hours frequently?
I moved roughly halfway around the world from my hometown. Any time I want to see my family I fly 10-14 hours followed by a 3-5 hr connection. Just got back from a trip home that was 29 hours door to door, which was the first time since the pandemic that the airlines didn’t fuck me with delays and missed connections. The last two times were 40+ hours.
So once or twice a year?
I’m talking monthly or every couple weeks
Right, I only fly once or twice a year, but I’m not sure how frequency of flying relates to whether reclining a seat is acceptable on a long flight.
If you flew frequently you would understand
No…shape shifters?
Remember the lady who was acting crazy and thought the man sitting next to her was a shape shifter lol
Lol, I do not. She accused him of being a skin walker?
