The Irish carrier made the demand yesterday, hours before a BBC Panorama documentary revealed the number of passengers arrested on suspicion of being drunk at a UK airport and on flights had risen 50% in the last year.
The BBC reported that a total of 387 people were arrested between February 2016 and February 2017 – up from 255 in the same period a year ago.
Meanwhile a Panorama survey of 4,000 cabin crew revealed that more than half of all respondents had witnessed disruptive drunken passengers behaviour at UK airports.
Ryanair has now demanded stronger measures to tackle the problem, urging airports to:
• Take more responsibility by banning the sale of all alcohol in bars and restaurants before 10am
• Introduce the mandatory use of boarding cards when purchasing alcoholic drinks in bars and restaurants and limit the number of drinks per boarding pass to a max of two.
• Control the sale of alcohol to passengers during flight delays by limiting the number of drinks per boarding pass to a max of two.
Ryanair said it had already “taken a number of measures to prevent disruptive behaviour on its UK flights”, with customers not allowed to consumer their own duty-free purchases onboard.
It added that customers flying from Glasgow Prestwick and Manchester to Alicante and Ibiza were no longer permitted to bring duty free alcohol with them onto the aircraft, with those who have purchased duty free alcohol asked to put it into the hold or leave their purchases behind.
Ryanair’s Kenny Jacobs said: “It’s completely unfair that airports can profit from the unlimited sale of alcohol to passengers and leave the airlines to deal with the safety consequences.
“This is a particular problem during flight delays when airports apply no limit to the sale of alcohol in airside bars and restaurants.
"This is an issue which the airports must now address and we are calling for significant changes to prohibit the sale of alcohol at airports, particularly with early morning flights and when flights are delayed… Given that all our flights are short-haul, very little alcohol is actually sold on board, so it’s incumbent on the airports to introduce these preventative measures to curb excessive drinking and the problems it creates, rather than allowing passengers to drink to excess before their flights.”
Responding to Ryanair’s claims and the Panorama documentary, Airlines UK, the Airport Operators Association and the UK Travel Retail Forum, issued a joint statement: “As an industry, we take the issue of disruptive passengers very seriously. Thankfully the problem of disruptive behaviour is rare, but where it does happen it can affect fellow passengers, airline crew and employees working at the airport.
“The industry is working hard to tackle the issue and last year launched a Code of Practice to create a common, consistent approach that co-ordinates and enhances existing efforts to prevent disruptive passenger behaviour.”
The Home Office is reportedly “considering” calls for tougher rules on alcohol.
