Ex-police chief: ‘People will die if passengers can get drunk airside’

Letting air passengers get “tanked up” on alcohol before boarding a plane is a disaster waiting to happen and people will die, a former top police officer has warned.

Ex-metropolitan Police commissioner Lord Blair of Boughton has torn into the Home Office after he said it rejected cross-party calls to extend licensing laws airside, branding its arguments as “simply fatuous”.

The independent crossbencher said he was astonished that controls on the sale of alcohol did not apply once travellers on international flights had gone through customs. 0 Lord Blair was frustrated at the government’s lack of action Lord Blair said it meant the offence of selling alcohol to someone who was already drunk did not exist there.

He vented his frustration at government inaction as peers debated a report by the Lords select committee on the Licensing Act 2003. The inquiry into the operation of the legislation heard evidence that many air rage incidents aboard flights were fuelled by alcohol and sometimes required the plane to be diverted.

The report, published earlier this year, had called for a change in the law so that it applied airside.

Lord Blair said it was “entirely astonishing” that at 7am people could “drink themselves stupid before they get on to a plane”.

He said: “I think sooner or later we will end up with people dying because somebody has got so drunk and so violent on a plane that a plane gets into real difficulties.”