Alcohol on planes: Is it the cause of bad behaviour?

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This was published 8 years ago

Alcohol on planes: Is it the cause of bad behaviour?

By Lee Tulloch
Updated
Unruly passengers, much like Kirsten Wiig's character in Bridesmaids, have been responsible for forcing flights to make unscheduled landings.

Unruly passengers, much like Kirsten Wiig's character in Bridesmaids, have been responsible for forcing flights to make unscheduled landings.

It's not all the pointy end of the plane in my world. In fact, if I didn't fly economy some times, I'd get far fewer ideas for this column.

There was, if you recall, the distressing flight to Kuala Lumpur where the small child screamed for eight hours.

And a couple of weeks ago, in economy on a flight from Dubai to Dublin, I was almost caught in a fistfight between a drunken passenger and an obnoxious one.

A couple enjoys cocktails mid-flight.

A couple enjoys cocktails mid-flight. Credit: Getty Images

The back of the plane is the great leveller. Three hundred people have exchanged airborne bacteria and the same toilet seat and slept together as intimately as lovers for eight hours. Add heightened stress, overcrowding, seemingly endless airport queues and delays and then top it up with a splash – or more – of alcohol and you have the perfect recipe for belligerent behaviour.

The fight on my Dublin flight was that deadly combination of excessive alcohol consumption and testosterone. Our two combatants were Mr Zurich and Mr Cape Town (I'm just guessing their nationalities here.) Mr Zurich commandeered the three seats across the aisle from me and settled in for a sleep before take-off.

Just as I had taken a sleeping pill and the cabin lights were dimmed, he decided it was time to wake up and invited a business acquaintance to sit with him. He spent the next three hours solidly earbashing his hapless companion. Even my noise-cancelling earphones couldn't mute all this hot air.

Meanwhile, three rows forward, Mr Cape Town and a male friend were knocking back beers and whiskeys but weren't doing much harm. The flight attendant clearly thought they were amusing and kept plying them with liquor.

We arrived in Dublin. Everyone jumped up to get their luggage from the overhead locker. Mr Cape Town manhandled me out of the way as he lurched against the tide to get his luggage from the overhead locker a couple of rows back from his seat. Mr Zurich collected his and stood in the aisle. Bumbling Mr Cape Town tried to get past him to get back to his forward seat. But Mr Zurich wouldn't move.

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Mr Cape Town started abusing him and still Mr Zurich refused to budge. I was stuck in the middle, so I asked Mr Zurich to let Mr Cape Town through. His point of view seemed to be that Mr Cape Town shouldn't have backtracked to get his luggage. Mr Zurich's point of view was that no one ever should do anything to ruffle the perfect enjoyment of his day.

Mr Cape Town started shoving and put up his fists. The language got ugly. They started shoving each other. I've seen examples of Aisle Rage before, but this one was escalating. And no flight attendants in sight.

I was stuck in the middle of both of them, an arrogant arsehole and a drunken buffoon. I tried to be peacemaker, but I was lucky I didn't get punched in the head.

In the end, it was simply the gravity of the flow of passengers behind pushing them onwards that stopped a full-on melee.

No one got arrested or taped to their seat, our flight wasn't diverted, nor did the drunk start to urinate on his fellow passengers, as Gerard Depardieu famously did once on a flight from Paris to Dublin. (What is it with Dublin?) It could have been worse.

In 2015, incidents of disruptive behaviour on flights, mostly drunkenness, hit a five-year high in Britain. My favourite incident was earlier this year when an intoxicated passenger attacked a cabin attendant with a prosthetic leg on a flight to Edinburgh. It probably wasn't that funny for the flight attendant.

A calming drink or two before and during flights seem perfectly reasonable on the face of it. But alcohol only increases the bad effects of flying. Alcohol impairs oxygen metabolism at altitude and increases dehydration. The effects of one drink are magnified two to three times over the effects that same drink would have at sea level.

Alcohol doesn't work with sleeping pills and it doesn't help calm anxieties. I don't even accept the welcome champagne any more as the bubbles play hell with my digestion (and that's difficult enough when your body is eating at alien times.)

But still, there are people who see a long-haul flight as the opportunity to get pissed, as if they were in a pub.

See also: What to do if there's a disruptive passenger on your flight
See also: Passenger shaming: Bad plane behaviour exposed

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