TOO SOZZLED TO TAKE HONEYMOON FLIGHT
THE man from the stag party boarded the 8am EasyJet flight from Spain to London Gatwick with bloodshot eyes, wearing a flamenco dress with a red frill that barely covered his bottom.
Glugging back miniature bottles of rosé wine, and egged on by his rowdy friends, he leered at the air hostess, tried to smoke in the toilet and attempted to break into the plane’s cockpit.
But his lewdest offence was directed at the unfortunate woman seated next to him. ‘About 90 minutes into the flight he stood up to find the lavatory before urinating on me instead,’ recalls Sally Howard, 40. ‘I was shocked, angry and upset. He had intimidated me throughout the flight and was so drunk I was surprised he was allowed to fly in the first place.’
Sally is far from alone in having an unpleasant ordeal on a flight because of a drunken passenger. As highlighted by a BBC Panorama documentary last week, the number of air passengers arrested for drunken misbehaviour on British flights or at British airports has risen by 50 per cent in the past year.
A survey of 4,000 cabin crew by Unite, meanwhile, found that one in five has been assaulted during a flight, and more than half have either experienced or witnessed verbal, sexual or physical harassment.
Last week also brought the story of newlyweds Darren and Nadia Stanway, who got so drunk before their honeymoon flight to Malta that concerned airline staff called the police.
Darren, 39, from Congleton in Cheshire, said he had been drinking beer and that Nadia, 34, had downed three bottles of wine in their taxi to Manchester Airport last month. Arriving too late to board their plane, the couple had a furious row and Darren was charged with public disorder.
BACk in May, a Virgin Atlantic flight from London to Jamaica had to make an unscheduled landing in Bermuda after a drunken man allegedly became abusive to cabin crew.
In June, a smartphone video clip of mother-of-three Tracey Bolton, 39, straddling sous chef Shaun Edmondson, 31, on a Manchester to Ibiza Ryanair flight went viral on social media. Tracey, an ordinarily respectable café owner, described herself as ‘mortified’ by the incident and blamed ‘drunken madness’.
A voluntary code of conduct introduced by the aviation industry last July, in which airlines and airports agreed to policies such as requesting that staff didn’t sell alcohol to drunken passengers, and warning passengers not to consume duty-free purchases on board, appears to have fallen on deaf ears. But why?
Airside licensing laws that allow us to quaff champagne at airport cafes at the crack of dawn, and a demob-happy holiday mentality compelling us to celebrate with booze before we even take off, certainly play a part.
Then there are the budget airlines that appear keen to subsidise ever-decreasing flight prices with alcohol sales. Meanwhile, beleaguered cabin crews often seem powerless to stop passengers drinking.
A toxic mix, then, that many of us will encounter this summer — if we haven’t already — and one that is still etched on Sally’s mind four years afterwards.
After spending a week holidaying with friends in June 2013, Sally, an author from London who has a one-year-old son, Leo, with partner Tim, 36, a lawyer, had viewed her return journey as a chance to collect her thoughts as she travelled home alone.
But, entering the departure lounge at Barcelona airport, she realised that this was unlikely to happen.
‘There was a stag party of around ten middle-aged British men, all drinking alcohol. They looked like they had been awake all night,’ recalls Sally, whose heart sank when one of the party — the man in the flamenco dress — sat next to her on the plane.
‘He made sexist advances like “you’re all right looking, aren’t you love?” and tried to grab the air hostess’s bum.
‘She told him and his friends to stop misbehaving but they didn’t listen. I tried not to engage but it was intimidating.’
Despite the party’s drunkenness, cabin crew were still willing to let them order alcohol — and after an hour the man next to Sally was barely coherent.
‘He’d already been caught staggering to the toilet with cigarettes,’ she says. ‘He got up to go back to the lavatory but was too drunk to realise he hadn’t made it and relieved himself at his seat instead. The urine came out from under his dress and onto my trousers. Afterwards he mumbled an embarrassed apology. I was too shocked to speak.’
As a concerned male passenger swapped seats with Sally, the man stumbled off to open the door to the plane’s cockpit.
‘Cabin crew told him he’d be arrested if he didn’t sit down. It seemed to finally sink in that he could be in trouble and he obeyed,’ says Sally. ‘Had I not seen how stressed the airline staff were, I would have complained. The man shouldn’t have been allowed on in the first place and shouldn’t have been able to carry on drinking.’
With airside cafes, bars and duty-free shops exempt from licensing laws, passengers spend around £300 million on alcohol at Uk airports each year — about a fifth of total retail sales.
A House of Lords report this April recommended that restrictions on alcohol sales at airports should be applied, but the idea has been deemed too difficult to implement.
Last April, 47-year-old kieran Bright shared his EasyJet flight from Bristol to Alicante in Spain — statistically one of the most drunken routes, along with Ibiza and Palma de Majorca — with four stag and hen groups. ‘They milled around bars in the departure lounge wearing fancy dress, which would have been normal if it were Saturday night. But it was 6am,’ says kieran, a learning disability support worker.
On board, the groups conducted lewd conversations across the aisles. kieran recalls: ‘They swore constantly and boasted of how much sex they were going to have. One hen talked about how she was going to get a tattoo of a cat on her genitals. Another was swigging Bombay Sapphire gin that she seemed to have brought on board from duty free.
‘At one point there were 20 men standing up and shouting aggressively. None of them could walk in a straight line and one lurched across my legs whenever the trolley came past. I worried that he’d pummel me if I asked him to move or suggested he keep quiet.’
What riles kieran most is that the cabin crew appeared to do nothing to stem the drunkenness. ‘All the parties were served vodka throughout the flight, which was outrageous,’ he says.
Each airline sets its own rules about alcohol and there is no limit on how much passengers can drink on a flight. It is a criminal offence to be intoxicated on board, however, and passengers are not permitted to drink alcohol they purchase duty-free.
SOMETIMES passengers who wouldn’t dream of losing control in the ‘real world’ drink to alleviate the stress of flying. Take Charlotte Harris, 30, a usually demure accounts assistant from London, for whom fear and excitement at her first holiday with boyfriend James proved ruinous.
The couple had been together for three months when they took their 9.45am EasyJet flight from Gatwick to Benidorm, Spain, in March 2015.
‘I was nervous about flying as I’d only been on a plane once before,’ says Charlotte. ‘I would never normally drink at that time of day but I decided a couple of vodka, lime and tonics would help steady my nerves.’
After the plane took off, she and James, 29, carried on drinking because, she says, ‘we were euphoric with the excitement of going away’.
Charlotte says it wasn’t until an hour into her flight that she was ‘tipped over the edge’ by the five vodka and tonics she had