Alcohol and altitude — a potentially dangerous cocktail on airplanes

I’ve had to fly a lot lately, for both work and family matters. I’ve been through a host of Canadian airports and American ones, too, and while this is only my own anecdotal experience, one thing I’ve been noticing is the growing number of people who are clearly drunk — and who are not only boarded anyway, but demand, and are served, more alcohol on the plane as well.

Things are already different with air travel: it’s like many normal drinking rules don’t apply. Day flights, late night flights, it doesn’t seem to matter: at a Five Guys Burger and Fries at the Raleigh Durham airport, I watched two men eating cheese and sausage breakfast sandwiches — while each man washed down breakfast with not one, but two bottles of Modelo beer. It might not be their normal breakfast, but in airports, it seems anything is OK.

I mean, I’m not a prude. No way am I an anti-drinking activist. Offer me a beer, and I’m likely to take it (though not at breakfast). But more and more, I seem to be running into critically gassed passengers.

I watched a passenger in Ottawa so inebriated that he could not read the departures sign: as he fumbled with his boarding pass, he dropped his carry-on, and then promptly tripped over it and fell face-first to the floor. He boarded anyway — holding his hand against the side of the jetway all the way down to the aircraft for balance.

On a two-hour flight from Toronto, I saw a passenger buy and consume six of the tiny bottles of rum — and two beer. He was still requesting liquor as we started our final descent into Halifax. The worst? At the beginning of December, on a three-hour flight to Toronto, I watched the man across the aisle and one row up buy and drink seven bottles of red wine before passing out so effectively — with his leg stuck out in the aisle — that cabin crew had to lift his leg to put his foot under the seat in front so they could get their cart by to collect trash.

I’ll end this list with the clear statement that you don’t want to be in the very back end of an aircraft with the entire crew of a ship, engineer to deck hands to captain, who are all heading home for the holidays and who spent a lengthy flight delay celebrating Christmas in the airport bar.

Their first question after sitting down and belting up? “When can we get drinks?”

Seriously: it’s about time airlines were as diligent about the clear issue of inebriated passengers as they are about oversized carryon luggage.

A variety of airlines now have staff circulating through the departures area of any number of airports tagging carryon bags as being an acceptable size, and advising people whose bags are too big that they’ll have to be checked, for a price.

And to be clear, I don’t blame the flight crews here.

I realize choosing not to serve an already-drunk passenger is a bit of a balancing act: planes regularly have to make sudden landings to deal with belligerent passengers, and I’m sure there would be more belligerence if people were regularly being told they couldn’t have another drink. But this seems more like a corporate relaxation of rules than any sort of flight crew reticence.

I’m sure that airlines love the idea of the inflated prices they collect on booze, and love to serve anyone who is willing to pay. But between airport bars and inflight drinks, the situation is not just potentially hostile, it’s also downright dangerous for other passengers.