Airports are the place where outside rules suddenly cease to exist. Beyondthe security gates and ID checkpoints, inhibitions loosen and time flows differently. Part of this is by design, from long corridors to the conspicuous absence of clocks, and the hour of the day doesn’t seem as important once inside the terminal. And if it doesn’t matter whether it’s 6 o’clock in the a.m. or the p.m., then it follows that there mustn’t be anything wrong with stopping at the airport bar for a quick pre-flight drink.
But Michael O’Leary, CEO of Irish budget carrier Ryanair, would beg to differ.
“I fail to understand why anybody in airports bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning. Who needs to be drinking beer at that time?” O’Leary told the Times in an interview published Tuesday.
According to O’Leary, airports have effectively delegated to airlines the consequences of early morning happy hour—namely, rowdy passengers boarding flights while less than lucid.
“It’s becoming a real challenge for all airlines,” O’Leary said, explaining disruptive behavior has become so commonplace Ryanair now has to divert a flight almost every day because of it.
“We are reasonably responsible, but the ones who are not responsible—the ones who are profiteering off it—are the airports who have these bars open at five or six o’clock in the morning,” he said.
Flying’s guilt-free ritual
Ryanair is Europe’s largest low-cost carrier, and primarily serves destinations on the continent and in North Africa. Though unruly passenger incidents, and airlines executives’ complaints, are hardly contained to one side of the Atlantic.
In the U.K., around two-thirds of travelers consider getting a drink before boarding their flight, according to a 2023 survey commissioned by Heathrow, London’s primary international airport. But a remarkable number of Americans are tempted by that departure terminal barstool as well, regardless of what the clocks say.
Of people who drink while they travel, 79% of men and 73% of women say they stop in an airport bar during their trip, according to a 2016 survey of 1,000 Americans by Cheapflights, a booking platform. While only 6% admitted to imbibing before 8 a.m. on travel day, almost 30% of those surveyed tend to order their first vacation drinks before noon.
Airports facilitate this norm-busting behavior. In addition to lounges, which usually start serving alcohol as soon as they open, terminal-bound watering holes can start slinging drinks shortly after their counterparts in the outside world wrap up last call. At JFK, bars and restaurants can generally take alcoholic drink orders starting at 6 a.m., same as in LAX.
Pre-flight drinking, of course, doesn’t have to start in the airport. A 2018 survey of 1,100 people by Delphi, an addiction treatment provider, found only 26% of respondents said they’d never taken intoxicants before or while flying. Many surveyed said they relied on alcohol and other substances to relax or to handle anxiety. The most common indulgence by far was alcohol, but many flyers also turn to marijuana edibles and non-prescribed medication to deal with flight jitters.
Taking vices to the sky
But as more flyers turn to booze to soothe their nerves, the number of aggressive incidents on planes involving passengers has crept up. The FAA reported a massive spike in onboard unruly incidents in the years following COVID-19 lockdowns, peaking in 2021 with 5,973 such occasions. The agency subsequently called for a tighter zero-tolerance policy and prohibiting visibly intoxicated passengers from boarding or consuming alcohol not provided by a flight attendant.
The number of incidents has since fallen steeply, but stricter controls that fall on airline staff isn’t enough for Ryanair’s O’Leary, who called for airports to take on some of the burden of policing passengers’ drinking habits, especially during early hours. Pushing airport bars to serve alcohol in accordance with regular licensing windows would be a start, he told the Times, while also advocating for passengers to be limited to two drinks while in the airport, verified by scanning individual boarding passes.
Beyond unruly behavior on airplanes, drinking before a flight might not be the cure-all passengers are hoping for. Medical researchers at the German Aerospace Center found in a 2024 study that falling asleep under the influence in a low-pressure environment similar to that found inside airplanes led to lower blood oxygen levels and cardiac strain, conditions that worsened with the amount of alcohol ingested and the duration of a flight. Drinking heavily before a long trip might escalate the risk of medical emergencies onboard, the authors warned, especially for those with pre-existing medical conditions.
Airports are one of the few remaining physical places where people can briefly turn into whomever they want, united in being just like everyone else but at the same time alone and unobserved. It might seem cruel to restrict the liberties of such a space, but in the case of humans and alcohol, some rules might be sound enough to survive a security checkpoint.
