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It is 10.30am on Thursday at Gatwick, and Jenny and her friend Alison, both 63, are drinking champagne. It’s an elegant scene. They are on a stopover between Barbados and Guernsey, and neither are planning to get drunk and kicked off their connecting flight. Alison describes the unique drinking culture at an airport. “We don’t know what day it is, never mind what time,” she says. “There aren’t any windows, so you can’t tell if it is day or night. Everyone is in a different time zone anyway, so nobody is looking at anyone else thinking, ‘They’re starting a bit early.’”
The perfect environment, in other words, to enjoy a morning drink. But now I’m casting around my mind for every other place on Earth where one might have a breakfast beer or glass of wine: cricket matches; bottomless brunches; weddings. In every one of those scenarios, a good number of drinkers would be carousing after half an hour. But the airport is so serene.
Last week, Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, reiterated his call for European airports to impose a two-drink limit on passengers. This was after a Ryanair plane from Dublin to Lanzarote had to be diverted to Porto, due to an allegedly drunk passenger causing trouble on board. Ryanair is now suing the passenger for €15,350 (£13,000), which may sound like a lot, but between putting up a plane full of passengers in the wrong city, emergency landing and handling fees, excess fuel, replacement crew and legal expenses, diversions can cost up to £80,000. And if you know anything at all about O’Leary, it’s that he probably wasn’t wild about spending all that money for no reason.
Psychologists sometimes describe “implicit social attunement” driving people towards drink, when a setting is so associated with alcohol that everyone just herds in that direction. It’s certainly true that, in airports, the sense of ritual is immense.
You get through security and your holiday has begun. Whatever the time actually is, it’s drink o’clock. At Gatwick, I find Neil with his wife, Julie, in the Flying Horse – the airport’s Wetherspoon’s. He shows me the WhatsApp group he has with his friends. Sure, they chat a bit. But mostly they exchange photos of their first drink of a holiday: a pint of Stella, with a departures board in the background; another pint of Stella, near a suitcase; one guy has a cheeky prosecco.
“This is where it all begins, it’s the anticipation,” says Marina, the bride in a hen party going to Budapest. Liz is from South Africa and has “found the way people will sit down to have a pint at nine o’clock in the morning in British airports fascinating”. But Heather, an American hen, says the US is way more raucous, and if they were dressed this way there – silver hats, sashes, matching pink sunglasses, a hell of a lot of hen paraphernalia – they’d attract a crowd wherever they went, all insisting on buying them drinks.
Around the core ritual – have a drink, never mind if it’s breakfast – cluster lots of smaller rituals. Have a glass of champagne, and also some fish eggs. Whose bright idea was the caviar bar? It has to exist as the hallmark of luxury, to heighten the indulgence of travel. But you don’t have to eat caviar – you can just sit near it and stick to fizz. The lure of the bloody mary is twofold: it’s a morning cocktail anyway, so it doesn’t matter what time it is; plus “your tastebuds change when you’re in the air,” Marina says, “so tomato juice is nice”. A full English breakfast, and a pint – when else have you ever done that? A glass of wine from a plastic third-size bottle, which is somehow not at all as dicey (though exactly the same number of units) as a miniature spirit. An Irish coffee, with the same squirty cream and no more ceremony than you’d have necking a Frappuccino.
Croydon, the UK’s sole international airport in the interwar period, was still by 1956 the only one in the world where you couldn’t get a drink. MPs worried this kind of thing was giving the country a reputation for abstemiousness, so airports, ports and hoverports were removed from the country’s licensing regulations.
Fast forward 40 years, and airports had changed completely. In the 1990s, “they became more retail and hospitality places,” explains Sean, a British Airways cabin manager. “That decade also saw the rise in frequent flyer lounges, where alcohol is free.”
There was a surge of disruptive incidents on planes from the mid-90s, which gave rise to a 2003 act that made drunkenness on planes an arrestable offence. Airlines tend to have a “zero tolerance policy on allowing anyone to board who’s intoxicated”, says Sean. “To the air navigation provider, if a senior cabin crew allows an intoxicated person to board, that becomes the cabin crew’s problem.”
Drunkenness isn’t always obvious, though. “You don’t know what medications people are on,” he says, “which could look like drunkenness. Some very rational people, who are completely sober, can be just as disruptive if their flight is delayed, or they’ve missed a connection or lost their bags.”
Also, they may be sober when they get on and then experience something like an altitude effect. “If you don’t fly very often and you’re used to having three or four gin and tonics with dinner and have that on a plane, it may process more like nine or 10,” says Sean. What’s the worst thing a drunk person could do on a plane? “They might try to assault another passenger. There have been sexual assaults. They might try to open the doors, which can’t open anyway once they’re in the air, since they’re sealed by the pressure. But the other passengers don’t like it.”
The alternative to diverting a plane is to restrain the troublesome passenger; all flights carry restraint kits. But, Sean says, you’d always choose to divert first, if possible. “I’ve restrained a passenger twice, in my 30-year career, and it’s not a nice thing to have to do.”
“You don’t want to spoil your holiday for one drink,” says Jõao Viera, the supervisor at the Wondertree restaurant in Gatwick’s south terminal. In an airport, he explains, “people who would normally just keep on going will have a tendency to behave”. All the bars and restaurants have a sign stating that one too many is all it takes to “ruin a holiday, cause a delay, land you in jail, cancel a flight, or divert a plane”.
Viera can’t remember ever having to wave the sign in anyone’s face, although occasionally he’s had to refuse to serve shots. In the 90s, it was normal to drink an absolute skinful if you were scared of flying, as one in 10 people are. But, Viera says, there are better systems around phobias now – mainly the sunflower lanyard, which signals a hidden disability and asks that everyone treat the wearer more gently.
Evelina, the duty manager at Wondertree, says that there are consequences for bar staff who allow passengers to get drunk: the venue could lose its licence, and staff would be held responsible. That’s true of all bars but, for some reason, your average Saturday night town centre does tend to see rather more punters contesting the extent of their inebriation. Maybe we’re all just a bit nicer when we’re about to go on holiday.
There is a sense of heavy consequence when you’re in the air, or about to be: you know you’re not allowed to be messy drunk; that you can’t swear at or even near the senior cabin crew; that you have to use your indoor voices. These norms get into your bones, and for good reason – the maximum penalty for disrupting a flight through drunkenness is two years in prison. If you endanger the safety of an aircraft, that could go up to five years.
At 1.30pm, the pubs in Gatwick are all full – particularly the Wetherspoon’s – and the noise levels aren’t even slightly raised. The passenger demographic is different at a hub airport such as this one, where there are more solo travellers and families. “Regional airports with low-cost operators take a lot more parties,” Sean says. “Certainly stag dos, and hen dos are nearly as bad. People are competing with each other to be the loudest and the most gregarious.” The hen party going to Budapest has taken off, but they were never making a nuisance of themselves anyway.
Is it possible that O’Leary has overstated his case? Chiara, on her way to the Dominican Republic with Mark, both having a pint in the Flying Horse, think the timing is a little iffy. “The funny thing is, Ryanair have introduced preorder drinks [via the Ryanair app] on the plane, so they come to you quicker than a trolley service.” Is it possible they may not be aiming for people to drink less, so much as to redistribute the way we drink, so that we do more of it on the plane?
Photograph: Islandstock/Alamy
Neil thinks it’s part of a wider culture: the entire travel industry trying to limit people’s drinking. “It’s the same in the Spanish all-inclusive resorts. They’re trying to put a cap on the number of drinks you have, so you can have more in the evening but less in the morning. That’s not what English people go on holiday for!”
Julie has been on a plane with a drunk before: “She was having an altercation with the stewardess.” The flight was grounded and had to wait for the Cypriot police, who were armed when they arrived. This was years ago, but it was still annoying. “People have to take responsibility for themselves,” she says.
At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game. According to the International Air Transport Association, there was one disruptive incident for every 480 flights in 2023: up from 568 in 2022, and far more than the pre-Covid era. If you live long enough and fly often enough, you’re going to witness a booze-related incident on a plane, as 60 % of people say they have.
The striking thing is that airports are carnivalesque – all the normal rules are waived. Yet on this Thursday in Gatwick, nobody is even laughing too loud. Maybe that’s the untold story of our national character: we can drink without getting drunk, but only here. In an airport, we’re practically French.
Some names have been changed.
