An intoxicated passenger refused to fasten his seatbelt and got removed from his Manchester – Ibiza flight prior to departure on September 13.
That’s pretty standard for Ibiza flights, by the way, and when Delta said they would let SkyMiles members and employees choose one of three new transatlantic destinations (Sardinia, Malta, Ibiza) it seemed pretty clear Ibiza wasn’t going get picked. It’s not a premium destination (‘which one of these is not like the other…’). There’s a reason this 2 hour 45 minute journey is served by (and only by!) Jet2, Ryanair and easyJet.
Onboard, two officers enter the cabin and perform a “four‑limb carry” of the man down the aisle, take him down the steps and into a police van.
Under the UK Air Navigation Order 2016, everyone on board must obey the lawful commands—including fastening a seatbelt when instructed. Being drunk on board also is an offence under UK rules, though also expected on UK holiday airlines flying to Spanish beach destinations.
A flight attendant opening the lavatory door to reveal passengers who’d just met joinng the mile high club is pretty typical on these flights, actually.
— aney stokes (@VideosIrish) September 10, 2023
Fortunately for the airlines, there’s no UK261/EU261 compensation here because unruly passengers are generally “extraordinary circumstances” providing them with an exemption (although they still owe a duty of care to inconvenienced passengers, including hotels on forced overnights that sometimes follow). EU compensation would surely make Ibiza operations way too costly.
Ryanair is pushing to limit airport drinking not only for their own operational reasons (to avoid drunk passengers onboard – although they could stop this by investing sufficiently in gate staff to monitor passenger fitness to fly as they scan boarding passes) but also so that they can have a monopoly on alcohol sales to passengers.
European low cost carriers are increasingly billing or suing unruly passengers for the costs of diversions and mass delays. There was no diversion here, but delays are still expensive and the passenger was clearly at fault.
Shockingly here, though, there was a two hour wait for police. So perhaps police response time would mitigate liability, even though passenger behavior was the trigger for events that followed.
Two back-to-back! (one more time, the *misbehavior* is the problem, not the background of the person… anyone wanna ‘going there’ again, anyway?)
I would imagine that a (presumably dry) two-hour wait for the police to arrive might afford a drunkard time to regain sufficient sobriety to temper their behavior a bit. Clearly, this was not the case. I wonder how high the passenger’s BAC was upon boarding.
Making the decision between taking one of these cheap ”oliday flights” from anywhere in the UK to anywhere in Spain or being hosed down with radioactive sludge would be an easy one for me!