Sozzled at 30,000ft: Why should the sky be the limit for reckless drinkers at our airports?

EARLY this summer a drunk passenger on a flight from Glasgow to Dalaman in Turkey decided to have a cigarette in the aircraft toilet.

It was a poor decision which almost certainly would not have been made in sobriety.

Nor, without the reckless urging of alcohol, would the incident have produced the furious backlash it did when the passenger left the toilet.

But this was a flight from a Scottish airport where the bars open in the early hours and remain so until very late at night when the last flight out has left.

This was a flight from one of those airports where, as soon as passengers leave security, they are forced on a circuitous journey through a duty-free shop groaning with special offers on the hard stuff for that traditional holiday bellyful.

Some devious travellers, greedy for a good time before they reach their destinations, buy this alcohol and go straight to a toilet cubicle where they decant it into a soft drink bottle. That way, they can pretend to drink lemonade on the aircraft as they are getting wrecked.

Corrosive

There is, then, an excellent chance that in any pressurised cabin taking off from Scotland with, say, 200 people on board and several flying hours ahead, alcohol and its corrosive effects on behaviour will become a serious issue.

Indeed, as an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama revealed this week, that chance has increased dramatically on flights from UK airports – and disproportionally so on flights from Scottish ones. Arrests of drunk air passengers are up by 50 per cent in a single year.

So there was perhaps a certain grim inevitability about the scene which played out on Thomas Cook flight MT640 when, somewhere over central Europe, someone started smoking in the loo. It sparked an argument, followed by a drunken melee involving two families which became so heated that the captain had to divert to Sofia in Bulgaria.

That is the thing about drunken melees on aircraft. You cannot just kick the culprits off the premises like you can in bars or nightclubs on terra firma.

To eject problem customers from an aeroplane, you must first ruin everybody’s journey, throw their plans into disarray, pile on yet more stress for those travelling with babies and children and delay hundreds of others waiting for the return flight at the destination airport.

Seen in this way, the consequences flowing from one boozy passenger’s fly puff in a toilet fitted with sensitive smoke detectors were staggering in their reach. Five people were arrested on the ground in Sofia, including the parents of an 11-year-old girl for whom care arrangements now had to be made.

Hundreds of passengers arrived in Dalaman three and a half hours late, resulting in the cancellation of the return flight, meaning hundreds more had to spend the night in a hotel and travel home almost a day late, missing work in many cases.

And of course, as the evergrowing army of victims of this airport booze culture can attest, this Turkey debacle was hardly a one-off. Flights to holiday destinations such as Mallorca, Ibiza and Alicante regularly divert to kick off drunken boors or stag parties determined to subject the entire aircraft to their riot.

Isn’t this all a rather high price to pay for upholding the drinking rights of the holidaying Scot? And who ever imagined that opening a bar at 4am was a good idea in the first place?

In most of our towns and cities the first beers do not cross the bar until at least 11am and, fortunately, we can avert our gaze when they do. Not so in Scottish airports, where bars are almost never closed and the effects of the drinks they serve spill out into crowded departure lounges and onto aircraft.

Why, when strict licensing laws govern town centre pub drinkers journeying no further than the bottom of their bottle, is it a free-for-all at airports where drinkers are about to journey in a metal tube five miles up in the sky in very close proximity to fellow passengers?

To their credit, most budget airlines have been quicker to act than the airports. Jet2 grew so sick of diverting its aircraft to offload drunks that passengers buying duty-free alcohol at Glasgow Airport had to keep it in specially sealed bags checked at the departure gate.

That did not stop them loading up in the bars, however.

Now Ryanair has called for a two-drink limit at UK airports and a ban on alcohol being served before 10am. ‘This is an issue which the airports must now address,’ said chief marketing officer Kenny Jacobs. ‘We are calling for significant changes to prohibit the sale of alcohol, particularly with early morning flights and when flights are delayed.’

While Ryanair may not be synonymous in every passenger’s mind with stress-free flying, surely it has a point here. Carriers can do their bit to ensure the smoothest possible passage from A to B. They can identify troublemakers at the departure gate or, failing that, before take-off and spare other passengers the ordeal of having to fly with them.

Problem

They can serve soft drinks only on some routes and ban all alcohol – sealed or otherwise – from hand luggage.

But all this merely serves to illustrate that the fundamental problem lies with the airports themselves. Jet2 managing director Phil Ward is spot on when he reminds passengers that aeroplanes are not nightclubs. Now airports need to remember they are not nightclubs either.

Perhaps this will be painful for them. For years their profits have been swelled by the rivers of drink flowing from the bars and by the tacit understanding with certain of its customers that, now you’re at the airport and through security, it’s time to party.

Airports would do better if they made it clear that, like the rest of us, they do not understand customers who want three pints of lager with their fried breakfasts at 7am before waddling off in a boozy haze to their departure gates.

They would do better to be clear that they are transport hubs, catering for all ages and sensibilities in an era of heightened nervousness about air security. They are not playgrounds for drink-sodden stag and hen parties shrieking and caterwauling and falling over their luggage.

Misuse

In the airports’ defence Karen Dee, chief executive of the Airport Operators Association, argues it is not the sale of alcohol that is the problem but the misuse of it. But aren’t most of us grown up enough to know that wherever alcohol is available to the public there is almost always an element of misuse? Isn’t that why we have licensing laws?

The mystery is why they are not applied more strictly in airports where the consequences of misuse are so much more severe for all around. Indeed, the mystery is why anyone ordering a beer at 5, 6 or 7am is not automatically considered to be misusing alcohol.

Airports need to shake themselves out of denial and start taking some responsibility for the state of passengers boarding planes. They need to stop finding the stags and hens and their lurid T-shirts and their whole sorry, bevvy-obsessed culture so hilarious, and to tell them to do their partying at their destination – not on airport premises at the expense of other customers.

I’ll be frank. They can drink themselves senseless in Magaluf or Ibiza Town or Torremolinos for all I care because I don’t have to watch. These are party towns and people seeking peace and quiet there ought to do better research.

But as long as we are forced to use the same airports and aircraft as the party animals, a little human consideration is the least we should expect – if not from the boozers then from the enablers pouring it down their throats.