Banned by one, banned by all: why the UK and US are cracking down on drunk passengers

If you have flown anywhere this summer, you may have sensed a shift in tone. Airlines and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are converging on the same conclusion: the era of treating disruptive, alcohol-fuelled passengers as an unfortunate cost of doing business is ending. New proposals in the UK and a rare enforcement action in the US suggest the crackdown is moving from rhetoric to legislation, and in some cases to your wallet before you have even boarded.

What the UK is proposing

The headline measure is a national ban list. At present, an airline can ban a passenger for life, but that ban applies only to that one carrier, so a traveller thrown off one flight can often book with another the next morning. Officials at the Department for Transport (DfT) and the Home Office are developing a scheme that would let carriers share information on unruly passengers. Still at the concept stage, the plan would require airlines to notify the government of a disruptive passenger; should that person try to check in for a later flight, participating airlines would be alerted and given the option to refuse carriage. The final decision would rest with the airline, and the database would be co-operatively managed by the government and industry.

The framing from Whitehall is deliberately moderate. "Everyone should be able to enjoy a pint at the airport, but antisocial behaviour on flights is totally unacceptable," a government source said, adding that it threatens the safety of passengers and crew and disrupts hard-earned holidays. Notably, the move would not require any change in current law. The industry has wanted it for years. Jet2's chief operations officer Phil Ward said the airline had been lobbying for a formal cross-airline scheme “for some time,” while Tim Alderslade of Airlines UK called a national ban list “an important next step in ensuring a tiny minority of passengers cannot disrupt air travel for the majority.”

Why the appetite for more

Part of the answer is political: a YouGov survey of 5,173 British adults in April found three out of four people support a government database so disruptive passengers can be banned industry-wide. The behaviour also spikes during the busy summer period, and the worst cases stick in the public’s mind. In April, a court heard that drunk passenger Stephen Blofield, 61, became so abusive that a Ryanair pilot had to abort a first landing into Bristol. Blofield was jailed for 10 months. In February, Jet2 banned two passengers for life after a mid-air brawl on a flight from Turkey forced an emergency landing in Brussels, where the men were arrested.

The statistics are more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Some reporting points to a steady rise in incidents, yet the most recent global figures show an improvement. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) recorded a decline last year, from one incident every 307 flights in 2024 to one every 355 in 2025. The crackdown is therefore better understood as a response to the disproportionate cost of the worst cases. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary says the airline is now forced to divert nearly one flight a day for bad behaviour, up from one a week a decade ago, and has called for airports to stop serving alcohol before early morning flights. That points to the parallel debate over airport drinking, where airports effectively operate outside normal licensing hours with no rules on when drink can be served. 

The American angle: stopping it at the door

The US is attacking the same problem from the other end of the journey. Rather than focusing on what happens mid-air, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is targeting the moment of boarding, reviving a rule that has sat largely dormant. It recently proposed fining Alaska Airlines $165,000 after an audit found intoxicated passengers were allowed to board on 11 flights between February 2024 and February 2025. The legal basis is longstanding: no carrier may allow any person to board if that person appears to be intoxicated. What is new is the willingness to enforce it. 

The practical consequence is a quiet shift of responsibility onto cabin crew, who must now watch boarding more closely and offload anyone visibly drunk. Yet US carriers typically staff domestic flights with just three crew, leaving one attendant at the front juggling catering, pre-departure drinks and observing every boarding passenger. Automation compounds it. With self-check-in and automated gates, boarding may now be the first and only time any employee interacts with a passenger. The likely casualty, ironically, is the complimentary first-class welcome drink: the crackdown could prove the authoritative reason for crew to skip pre-departure beverage service, since staffing levels are not going to change. 

Does it threaten civil liberties?

This is the genuinely difficult part. A national database of people barred from an essential mode of transport, compiled by private companies and shared with the state, raises obvious questions: who decides what counts as serious, is there a right of appeal, and how long does a name remain? There is also a concrete legal wrinkle. Sharing passenger details in this way is not currently permitted under GDPR, which is precisely why a passenger banned by one airline can today book with another, and it remains unclear how the plan squares with data protection law even though it needs no new primary legislation. The counter-argument is proportionality: flying is not a fundamental right, the final boarding decision stays with the airline, and Which? Travel's Rory Boland argues that when the safety stakes are so high, it is right that the penalty matches the seriousness. Whether the threshold holds, or drifts downward over time, is what civil liberties groups will rightly watch.

Does it go far enough?

That depends on what you think the problem is. A credible industry-wide ban is probably the single most effective deterrent for the worst offenders, far more so than fines many will never pay. But there is a strong case that both approaches treat the symptom rather than the cause. If alcohol is the common denominator, the most direct intervention is at the point of sale, not the point of disruption, which is exactly what O'Leary's pre-flight pint ban targets. The UK proposal pointedly stops short of restricting airport drinking, and the US action burdens overstretched crew rather than the licensing regime. Both measures will likely proceed, because the incentives all point the same way. The real test is whether the crackdown is matched by the safeguards on appeal rights, data protection and proportionate thresholds that would stop a reasonable safety measure from quietly becoming something harder to defend.