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Ryanair boss supports onboard drinks limit
After calling for airports to impose a two alcoholic drinks limit on passengers before boarding, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has now said that he would support a similar restriction once they are on the plane.
In August, O’Leary told The Telegraph that alcohol was, along with illegal drugs, a factor in the “misbehaviour” of some passengers: “Most of our passengers show up an hour before departure. That’s sufficient for two drinks. But if your flight is delayed by two or three hours, you can’t be guzzling five, six, eight, ten pints of beer. Go and have a coffee or a cup of tea. It’s not an alcoholics’ outing.”
Among those to criticise O’Leary’s suggestion was Wetherspoons tycoon Sir Tim Martin, who retaliated: “Years ago we stopped selling ‘shooters’ at airports, as well as ‘double-up’ offers. Ryanair in contrast offers a discount on Irish whiskey if a double is ordered.”
But it appears that O’Leary is in favour of also cracking down on how much alcohol passengers can consume when they’re on the plane.
He told Sky News last week: “If the price of putting a drink limit on the airport, where the problem is being created, is putting a drink limit on board the aircraft, we’ve no problem with that.”
“They’re [passengers are] getting on board with too much alcohol in their system. If we identify them as being drunk on board, we don’t serve them alcohol. But that doesn’t solve the problem,” he added.
As for when he would be ready to bring in the new policy, O’Leary, who has been Ryanair CEO for 30 years, claimed that he would be “happy to do it tomorrow”.
This crusade against excessive drinking is a far cry from what O’Leary previously, infamously said: “If drink sales are falling off, we get the pilots to engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes sales.”
O’Leary’s change of mind has been prompted by another summer of disruption caused by drunken passengers. Last week, a Ryanair flight from Manchester to Ibiza, a route that has consistently seen trouble, was diverted to Toulouse after, according to a statement from the budget airline, “a small group of passengers became disruptive inflight”.
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