When the guy next to me on the flight downed his third bottle of wine, I felt unsafe

Enjoying a drink while flying sounds like fun, until you’re the person stuck next to someone who’s had one (or four) too many. That was me last weekend on a Ballina to Melbourne flight, during which my seat-neighbour was served three bottles of wine.

They were cute 187ml bottles rather than full-sized ones but, after landing, I discovered that, at 14 per cent alcohol, each bottle contained over two standard drinks. The flight time was just over two hours and service started once we were at cruising altitude. This man had comfortably polished off his third bottle by the time we started our descent. This means he was served (and drank) over six standard drinks in the space of about one hour.

How much booze is too much on an aircraft? Credit: Getty Images

In the end, nothing terrible happened on my flight (compared with horror stories about drunk passengers urinating, vomiting, sexually and physically assaulting crew and passengers, forcing the flight to be turned around or needing to be zip-tied to the armrests). While I was relieved things didn’t escalate, I know this was good luck rather than good management.

Because the truth is that I felt unsafe from the moment he was served his third bottle. My wariness had been pre-empted by his being rude to another passenger on arrival. My concern increased as I watched him walk unsteadily to the toilet, loud and garrulous while chatting to the crew, then laughing out loud at what he was listening to on his headphones. I feared a red wine splash at any moment, especially during turbulence.

Instead of reading my book or listening to music, I spent the flight thinking about booze. I remembered that guidelines for staying under a blood alcohol reading of 0.05 (that’s 0.05g of alcohol in every 100ml of blood) are to imbibe no more than two standard drinks in the first hour, then one drink each hour after that. This means my neighbour was served at least twice our legal limit for driving. Of course, he wasn’t flying the plane, but I figure 0.05 is a good ceiling to stay under while stuck in a metal tube at 35,000 feet in very close proximity to complete strangers.

I waited before disembarking to share my discomfort with the flight attendants. They took my concern seriously, saying they were conscious of this guy’s consumption and that they had decided to serve only one more bottle after his second. They also noted he wasn’t visibly intoxicated, which seems to be their indicator to refuse further service.

So, I’m not taking issue with this particular crew but rather with the broader guidelines that all Australian airlines have around alcohol. For starters, once someone is visibly drunk, it’s too late. Waaaaaaaay too late. Obvious intoxication is not a switch that can be turned off quickly. In fact, as a rough estimate, it will take an hour to reverse the effects of one standard drink, meaning this guy wouldn’t be completely sober until hours after the fight landed.

My other issue is that, given he drank quickly and ordered a third bottle immediately after finishing the second, the crew’s assessment of his state was made before that second bottle had taken effect. It’s also not hard to imagine it would be tempting for the crew to decide to serve “just one more” rather than potentially provoke the sort of argument that’s not unexpected when telling someone who’s drunk that they’ve had enough.

A solution seems strikingly straightforward: a limit of one standard drink per hour per passenger. This seems simple enough to monitor, especially with seat changes being almost non-existent these days.

An objectively measurable, evidence-based guideline would provide far greater clarity to staff and passengers than subjective guesses about intoxication. It could be easily communicated as part of the check-in process and standard drink quantities could be added to in-flight menus. Sure, there’d be occasional issues with people drinking a friend’s allocation (I mean, back in the one-free-drink days, I once got an extra glass by requesting one for my souvenir plushy puffin who I had buckled into a spare seat) but this would be rare and at least partly monitorable.

I get that airlines make income from their in-flight service, but that shouldn’t happen at the expense of safety (and, with cheap flights seemingly a thing of the past, I’m far less concerned about airlines’ profit margins).

My idea has some similarities to a call last year by the boss of Ryanair for airport bars to limit alcohol to two drinks per person. While enforcement of that plan doesn’t seem feasible, my idea would at least prevent someone who’d imbibed before boarding getting more drunk mid-flight.

So, on my two-hour flight, the red wine-loving passenger could have enjoyed one mini-bottle. I reckon that’s not an unreasonable imposition: it might’ve saved him from some negative health consequences and it would have allowed me to have a far more relaxing flight (turbulence aside).

Vivienne Pearson is a freelance writer.