FAA Finds Airline Let Drunk Passengers Board 11 Flights — First Class Drinks May Take The Blame

The FAA has proposed a $165,000 fine against Alaska Airlines for allegedly allowing intoxicated passengers to board 11 flights between February 2024 and February 2025, in violation of federal rules.

According to Alaska Airlines,

We take seriously our responsibility to provide a safe and secure environment for our guests and employees. We participated fully with the FAA’s audit of our policies and practices as it relates to intoxicated guests on board our aircraft.

Since the FAA shared these concerns with us over a year ago, we made meaningful changes to ensure compliance with the FAA’s expectations – including enhanced training for all flight attendants and customer service agents. We respect the results of the FAA’s audit and are confident in the changes that have been in place for the last year to ensure our shared standards are being met

Flight attendant blog Paddle Your Own Kanoo suggests this could mean the end of first class predeparture beverages, because flight attendants are supposed to be “passenger behavior at the boarding door.”

And since customers come into contact with fewer employees – using kiosks or an app to check in, and with reduced staffing at the gate – there’s no one else left to make sure customers aren’t drunk when they got on the aircraft. That means they can’t be distracted by providing service while the aircraft boards.

Realistically, the ability of even the best flight attendant to monitor the behavior of every passenger boarding the plane, while also serving pre-departure beverages, is a stretch.

…There’s always been a tension amongst flight attendants to complete pre-departure beverage service, given all of their other responsibilities during boarding, but this new FAA crackdown could prove to be the authoritative reason that crew members skip this service.

I do not think this is correct, though.

• Alaska Airlines only just started offering full drink service in first class prior to departure this year. Predeparture beverages cannot reasonably be blamed for why flight attendants weren’t noticing intoxicated passengers.

• Alaska actually introduced full predeparture beverage service after learning the results of the FAA audit on intoxicated passengers. These were passengers were who inebriated prior to boarding Alaska flights – not customers becoming intoxicated because flight attendants overserved them.

• A much bigger issue is reduced staffing at gates, where agents have to help customers, scan boarding passes, and enforce bag rules and I’ve been writing for years that gate agents no longer have the bandwidth to pay attention to problem passengers.)

• A $165,000 fine is immaterial. And predeparture beverages are worth far more than that to an airline’s bottom line. Premium customer satisfaction with flight attendants is driven by predeparture beverages and using a customer’s name. A single point of net promoter score is worth $50 to $100 million to a major network airline.

  

Predeparture beverages are an easy scape goat predeparture beverages. The head of the largest flight attendants union doesn’t want airlines serving alcohol at all, though when carriers suspended it during the pandemic that meant passengers pregaming in the airport and boarding drunk more often.

But predeparture beverages are valuable to an airline to offer, so flight attendants will still be expected to serve them – even as too many ignore those instructions, knowing that a simple shrug and statement that they were worried about delaying the departure if they provided service will mean no consequences for failing to deliver on the service standard.