Britain's new Aviation Minister to examine alcohol sales at airports

Alcohol sales are to be examined by Britain's new Aviation Minister, Lord Ahmad, after in-flight drink related incidents are becoming more common.

Statistics show that over the last two years, 442 passengers were held at an airport on suspicion of being drunk while travelling.

Lord Ahmad will be examining the ways in which airports sell alcohol in order to shrink the in-flight drink related incident figures. In particular, he will be looking into the times that alcohol is available to passengers, and passenger screening methods.

Many airlines, Jet2.com in particular, have been asking the government to take action on airport alcohol sales, in order to decrease the amount of poorly behaved travellers, most of who are intoxicated.

Already choosing to lead the way with their lifetime ban policy on poorly behaved travellers, Jet2.com has spurred other travel companies to promote stronger rules on poor inflight behaviour.

After being told to disembark the plane before even taking off, a female Easyjet passenger recently punched a pilot in the face in Manchester.

German police had to intervene back in February when a stag party made up of six men caused an inflight fight when travelling from Luton to Slovakia, resulting in them being arrested. The Ryanair plane was forced to divert to Berlin in order to deal with the rowdy party.

Lord Ahmad said: “If you’re a young family travelling on a plane you want to go from point A to B, you don’t want to be disrupted.

I don’t think we want to kill merriment altogether, but I think it’s important that passengers who board planes are also responsible and have a responsibility to other passengers, and that certainly should be the factor which we bear in mind.

“In terms of specific regulations of timings of outlets [which sell alcohol] and how they operate, clearly I want to have a look at that.”

Published 01 Aug 2016

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