Early morning pre-flight airport pints should be banned, Ryanair boss says
The early morning airport pint should be banned, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has argued.
He said his airline is being forced to divert flights almost daily because of drunken, aggressive passengers, and the problem is getting worse.
And in an attempt to stamp out such behaviour, Mr O’Leary wants airport bars to stop serving alcohol so early and fall in line with licensing rules of pubs outside airports.
He told The Times: ‘I fail to understand why anybody in airport bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning. Who needs to be drinking beer at that time?’
He added: ‘There should be no alcohol served at airports outside [those] licensing hours.’
The CEO has been calling for a two-drink per-person limit ‘for many years’ and accused airports of ‘profiteering’ off the troublesome travel ritual and ‘exporting the problem to the airlines’.
Ryanair is ‘reasonably responsible’ with their drinks, rarely serving a passenger more than two drinks onboard.
Drug use has entered the alcoholic mix too, worsening the issue as passengers then ‘want to fight’, he said.
Ryainair boss Michael O’Leary (pictured) wants to end the early morning pint travel ritual so many Britons follow as rowdy passengers are causing flight diversions almost daily, he said
Dramatic footage shows travellers screaming as passengers traded punches and wrestled with each other in the aisle
Flights from Britain to Ibiza, Alicante and Tenerife have been particularly problematic.
It is a criminal offence to be drunk on an aeroplane, punishable by up to two years in prison and a hefty fine.
Threatening and abusive passengers can be further prosecuted, as well as facing large compensation fees and prosecution in the country where the aircraft is forced to land.
Other airlines like Jet2 are lobbying for a national database to help ban disruptive passengers flying on UK airlines.
Ten years ago, Ryanair had roughly one diversion a week but now Mr O’Leary says it’s nearly one a day.
He said: ‘Until somebody creates an accident that causes a plane to crash and kills hundreds, no government will take this problem seriously and airlines are tearing their hair out.’
There have been countless incidents of unruly passengers on planes reported.
In February this year, a terrible brawl on a Jet2 flight from Turkey to Manchester left ‘blood and teeth on the floor’. The plane had to have an emergency landing and videos from the scene went viral.
Staff escorted away members of a rowdy Brit stag party group on easyJet plane after it was diverted between London Gatwick and Marrakesh in Morocco in May 2025
A bald man who had had a hair transplant loudly began asking other passengers if they wanted to listen to music.
A 21-year-old passenger from Sheffield told the Daily Mail: ‘I think him and another bloke had definitely been drinking before or on the flight because their behaviour just wasn’t normal’.
In another incident, a rowdy British stag party forced an easyJet flight to divert after they were seen vaping in their seats and abusing the cabin crew in May last year.
Six men were escorted off the plane in Faro, Portugal – hundreds of miles from their destination of Marrakech.
A further incident saw two drunken English passengers on a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Ibiza refuse to wear masks during the pandemic in August 2020.
A brawl broke out in mid-air, which ended with the Brits being arrested by Spanish police when they landed.
