A two-drink limit should be imposed by airport bars to curb rowdiness by passengers on flights.
The call came from Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary after a reported rise on violence on aircraft this summer.
Assaults on cabin crew were the greatest concern but confrontations between passengers had become common, he said.
O’Leary blamed some aggressive behaviour on holidaymakers mixing alcohol with other drugs.
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“It’s not that easy for airlines to identify people who are inebriated at the gate, particularly if they are boarding with two or three others,” he was reported by consumer media as saying.
“As long as they can stand up and shuffle they will get through. Then when the plane takes off we see the misbehaviour.
“We don’t want to begrudge people having a drink. But we don’t allow people to drink-drive, yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000ft.”
Technology would be needed to enforce a two drinks per boarding pass restriction with computers in each airport bar able to talk to one another.
“The airports, of course, are opposed to it and say that their bars don’t serve drunken passengers,” O’Leary said. “But they do serve the relatives of the drunken passenger.”
In the old days people who drank too much would eventually fall over or fall asleep
The budget airline has resorted to searching the cabin bags of passengers flying to Ibiza.
O’Leary said: “We used to only allow them to take bottles of water on board, not realising that they were full of vodka. Now we don’t even allow them to take those.
“In the old days people who drank too much would eventually fall over or fall asleep. But now those passengers are also on tablets and powder. It’s the mix.
“You get much more aggressive behaviour that becomes very difficult to manage. And it’s not directed just at the crew. Passengers fighting with each other is now a growing trend on board the aircraft.”
He added: “The biggest problem we have is when you have a day of bad delays. People are waiting around at airports and they keep lorrying alcohol into them.
“Most of our passengers show up an hour before departure. That’s sufficient for two dinks. But if your flight is delayed by two or three hours you can’t be guzzling five, six, eight, 10 pints of beer.
“Go and have a coffee or a cup of tea. It’s not an alcoholics’ outing.”
Sinead Quinn, responsible for training Ryanair’s 14,000 cabin crew, said the airline had banned some passengers and was increasingly sharing information on problem flyers with other airlines.
She told The Daily Telegraph: “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.”
O’Leary spoke out after a British holidaymaker was convicted last month of sexually assaulting a flight attendant on a Ryanair flight from Newcastle to Majorca in September last year.
The man had touched the steward’s bottom “in a lewd way” after pretending that he was having trouble with his credit card.
A man was arrested last August on suspicion of sexually assaulting a member of cabin crew and spitting on her boss on board a Jet2 flight from Manchester to Ibiza.
Ryanair demanded a ban on early morning drinking at airport bars before Covid after one of its flights had to be diverted due to disruptive passengers.
The airline blamed unruly passengers drinking at Dublin airport before take off for the disturbance on the flight to Ibiza in summer 2018.
Meanwhile, Ryanair is introducing new routes to Dubrovnik, Linz, Reggio and Sarajevo from London this winter.
O’Leary used the route launch to call on the new Labour government to abolish Air Passenger Duty for all travel.
“As an island economy on the periphery of Europe, it is vital that Ryanair continues to grow low-cost air access to/from the UK,” he said.
“Britain’s tourism growth is being hampered by UK APD, which unfairly imposes a £13 tax on all UK citizens/visitors, making air travel to/from the UK less competitive, particularly when other EU States, like Poland, Croatia, Italy, and Spain are lowering costs and cutting taxes, while growing rapidly.
“If the UK Government scraps APD on all flights, Ryanair will respond with rapid traffic growth for the rest of this decade, including 1,000 new jobs, 20 new UK based aircraft and a 14% growth in UK traffic to 65 million passengers per annum by 2030, just as we have done in Italy, where we added three new aircraft and over 20 new routes following the decision of regions, like Calabria, to scrap the Italian municipal tax.”