It is hard to think of anyone in aviation history who has done more to degrade the passenger experience of air travel than the man who has run Ryanair for the last 30 years. So forgive me if I’m not rushing to listen to Michael O’Leary’s thoughts on how to improve it.
Being allowed a drink before and during a Ryanair flight is about the only thing that makes the experience bearable in the first place
But his claim yesterday that we should significantly restrict passenger alcohol consumption has sparked apparently serious consideration. Suggesting that the remedy to the supposed problem may lie in a two-drink-per-passenger limit, O’Leary told the Daily Telegraph: ‘We don’t allow people to drink-drive, yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000 feet.’
Putting aside the fact that the way O’Leary phrased his comparison makes it sound as if his more inebriated passengers might be asked to actually fly the plane rather than just sit on it – which would require a significantly greater degree of mental competency – it’s still a terrible idea. Because being allowed a drink before and during a Ryanair flight is about the only thing that makes the experience bearable in the first place.
His suggestion that out-of-control drunks are increasingly making flying unviable simply doesn’t chime with lived experience. Yes, the Magistrates’ courts at Uxbridge (for Heathrow), Chelmsford (Stansted), Crawley (Gatwick) and Luton do a fairly brisk trade in passengers who have been arrested on landing. And inevitably, there will be the usual bunch who blame pesky prescription drugs for skewing their otherwise entirely reasonable intake of vodka towards the anti-social. But these incidents remain exceptional rather than the norm.
In fact in all the 50 odd years I’ve been flying, I can honestly say that I’ve only ever encountered one passenger who was getting to the point of being properly drunk on a plane – and that was me. But it had been a very long trip, I was coming down with something and there was no suggestion of criminality.
The places that would be most affected by O’Leary’s proposed restriction are those airside ersatz traditional pubs which are Britain’s unique contribution to global travel culture – and arguably as representative of our wider national culture as anything you might see on stamps or The One Show.
When Harry Wallop wrote a feature forthe Daily Mail last week about a day in the life of The Windmill – the airside Wetherspoons at Stansted – he found 50 people already drinking lager and Pinot Grigio when he arrived… at 3.30 a.m. That really is starting early.
I’m an occasional patron of this establishment myself. But favouring EasyJet over Ryanair, I more regularly enjoy its sister pubs at Gatwick, The Flying Horse and Red Lion. On my most recent visit there, ahead of a trip to Cyprus, at the more sedate hour of 6 a.m., their £12.99 full English breakfast was tempting but at 1,250 calories seemed potentially just too much that early. So I contented myself with breakfasting on two pints of Guinness, which I have no doubt helped me to snooze through much of the subsequent flight. By lunchtime I was looking down at the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite, eating grilled sea bream and sipping a chilled Xynisteri white while the sun glinted on the Mediterranean. I regretted nothing, except perhaps having spurned a third Guinness earlier.
Of course people can be snooty about such places. And indeed the class system is reflected in the variety of airport drinking venues, with lager at Wetherspoons for the masses, wine at a Wagamama for the middling and those champagne and oyster bars for the ostentatious elite.
But I’m happy at Spoons. I’m not sure I’d want to share my holiday accommodation with the rest of their clientele for ten days, but half an hour together dulled by early alcohol is just fine.
Any suggestion that we should legislate these travel drinking rites away is just another attempt to make the UK even more nanny state-ish that it has already become – and that’s before the government bans smoking in beer gardens and outside hospitals, as floated just today.
Would they really have us drive through miles and miles of 50 mph average speed limit motorway zones in the middle of the night, pay £20 a day to park in a field seven miles from the terminal, wait 20 minutes in the dark and rain for a bus to actually get us there, clutching our tiny bag, worried in case it is too big, make us check in two hours early for no apparent reason, throwing all our liquids in the bin at security, only to finally ban us from killing the hour and half that remains before we are finally allowed to board our plane in the pub? Yes, I’m afraid that they would.
But it would be pointless. Because the real problem powering any serious degeneration of mid-air social etiquette was actually identified by O’Leary, just not in the headlines: cocaine.
The line about, er, lines was buried much lower down in the story: ‘In the old days people who drank too much would eventually fall over or fall asleep. But now those passengers are also on tablets and powder,’ he said.
And he’s right. The mass take-up of recreational cocaine use over the last 20 years has fuelled everything from a resurgence in football hooliganism to an almost comic explosion in the number of cash-only barber shops across the UK.
Anyone serious about reducing anti-social behaviour on flights should start treating airports like nightclubs: installing more bouncers and cameras and removing flat surfaces from toilet cubicles. If there is a real problem, it’s not from pints and Pinot Grigio.