By David Luhnow

LONDON -- It's 7:30 a.m. at a Gatwick airport restaurant, and Emily Barber is on her second large glass of wine.

"I know it's a silly time to drink," says the 22-year-old recruitment specialist, waiting to board a flight to Benidorm, Spain, with friends. "But I'm a nervous flier."

"I don't get sh -- faced, but I'll have two glasses of wine and now I'm well ready to go!" she says, adding a celebratory whoop. Her friends raise their glasses to toast.

It's a tradition as British as afternoon tea: A few pints or cocktails in the morning before takeoff. Call it a rouser with the roosters.

A nearby table of friends off for a three-day bachelor party in Lisbon are downing beers. Next to them, a bachelorette party bound for Croatia sips Champagne. A group of Arsenal soccer fans is already on a second round.

The CEO of one of the world's largest airlines thinks it's time to sober up.

Ryanair's Michael O'Leary says the low-cost carrier is diverting an average of nearly one flight a day because of drunken behavior on board, up from one a week a decade ago.

Airport pubs, he says, are more than happy to ply patrons with booze and then hand off the problem to airlines. O'Leary is calling for U.K. airports to stop selling alcohol in the mornings, or at least cut patrons off after two rounds.

"I fail to understand why anybody in airport bars is serving people at five or six o'clock in the morning," he told British newspaper the Times. "Who needs to be drinking beer at that time?"

The idea failed to land. Pub owners, lawmakers, travel writers and travel drinkers all howled in protest.

A two-drink limit would be "extraordinarily difficult to implement, short of breathalysing passengers, and would, in our opinion, be an overreaction," said Tim Martin, CEO of JD Wetherspoon, the biggest pub chain in Britain, which also has pubs at the country's largest airports.

Culture writer Sarah Carson called the morning travel drink the moment many repressed Brits "are finally free to escape." Travel writer Cathy Adams defended it as a "fact of British life."

The majority of her Times readers disagree. In an online survey of nearly 15,000 readers, 67% say there should be a ban on alcohol before morning flights. "What if that drunk is sitting next to you on the plane, leering and belching?" wrote Philip Muldowney.

Tales of drunken Brits misbehaving on planes are legion. One group going on a golfing break in Turkey drank a SunExpress airplane's entire stock of booze within 25 minutes. Flights to Spain's party spot Ibiza regularly turn into onboard discos. A drunk EasyJet passenger once tried to storm the cockpit, saying he could fly better. Another tried to open the plane door midair.

Ryanair, which has a zero-tolerance approach to disruptive passengers, has been cooperating with police and prosecutors in different countries to help prosecute drunken fliers. (In the U.K., they face up to two years in jail). It now regularly publicizes cases, including two passengers sentenced to 10 months in jail last month in Toulouse, France, where an Ibiza-bound flight was diverted after they caused a disruption.

Jet2, another low-cost carrier, has called for the creation of an industrywide "no fly" list for drunken passengers after an Irish man threatened to fight the cabin crew on a flight from Turkey to London, forcing an emergency landing in Bulgaria.

While the morning travel tipple may be a particularly British predilection, the behavior that can accompany too much alcohol isn't a purely British problem. U.S. airlines briefly stopped alcohol sales during the pandemic as air-rage incidents surged, and reports of unruly passenger behavior remain above prepandemic levels.

Most pubs in England are licensed to sell alcohol starting from 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., but those past airport security are exempt from the rules. Airports say they want to accommodate a range of passengers from different time zones.

At the Wetherspoons in Gatwick and several other restaurants in the departure lounge, it wasn't hard to spot the early drinkers on a recent morning. About a third of the tables had alcohol.

Max Lewis, a 20-year-old from Portsmouth, was enjoying a breakfast pint with three friends ahead of a flight to Switzerland, where they planned to go "hiking and drinking," he says, before adding, "in that order."

His friend, Jake Cruz Riveron, says an alcohol ban is a heavy-handed approach. "It's like a nanny state, or helicopter parenting."

Phoebe Ord can understand the logic. "I see their staff have to put up with a lot of abuse," says the 31-year-old, who works in advertising. Still, she adds, "the problem with a blanket ban is it punishes the majority who drink and aren't a problem."

She counts herself among them. Ord, heading to a bachelorette party, had printed an itinerary for the long weekend. Part 1: "Travel. Down your mimosas gal we're flying easyJet's finest aircraft to Split, Croatia."

Barber, the Benidorm-bound recruitment specialist, has been cut off from having more booze on flights before, but says the drinking is usually harmless fun. "We were on a plane to Malta, and they stopped serving us, " she says. "We were just loud. We weren't like punching each other in the face and then biting the stewardess, know what I mean?"

Barber will be able to have her fun on the return journey, too. Wetherspoon has just opened its first pub in continental Europe in Spain's Alicante--Elche Miguel Hernández airport, the gateway to Benidorm.

Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 05, 2026 05:00 ET (09:00 GMT)

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