Two leading airlines do not have immediate plans to return to selling alcohol aboard flights.
American Airlines and Southwest Airlines both recently confirmed that they will continue to wait to bring back alcoholic beverages, CNBC reported. Alcohol sales were paused last year as airlines adopted new guidelines in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The confirmations from the airlines come days after the Federal Aviation Administration cited around 2,500 incidents involving passenger behavior thus far in 2021. The majority of those incidents involved passengers not complying with requirements to wear face masks.
“We also recognize that alcohol can contribute to atypical behavior from customers onboard and we owe it to our crew not to potentially exacerbate what can already be a new and stressful situation for our customers,” Brady Byrnes of American Airlines said, according to CNBC.
A mask mandate enforced by the Transportation Security Administration is scheduled to run through at least Sept. 13. American says it will continue to pause alcohol sales through that date.
Southwest, meanwhile, said it has “no timetable” for when the option to purchase alcoholic beverages will be back, CNBC reports.
A Southwest flight attendant has said she lost two teeth in a recent attack aboard a plane.
The president of the airline’s flight attendants’ union said there have been hundreds of incidents involving passengers since April 8.
“As alcohol sales are added back into this already volatile environment, you can surely understand our concern,” Lyn Montgomery reportedly said in a letter to the Southwest’s CEO.
©2021 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
—-
This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
Personally I do not think alcohol should be sold on commercial airlines. There are too many people in todays society that are angry and in some of these people, the alcohol makes them more angry.
Agreed.. Though you’d think, with all the DUMPING ON US that these airlines have done over the past 3_+ years , fols wouldn’t be so bloody eager to go BACK TO FLYING..
I suppose astronauts will need to mask up for future moon flights, right?
Bad behavior on airplanes could easily be solved by letting it be known that unruly passengers will be ejected from the plane, while in flight.
And a life time ban from that airline!
Alcohol sales on flights is not the problem. If it were, it would have been stopped long ago. I suspect that this is an attempt by the airlines to cover up the fact that it is them and their employees who are behaving badly, being rude, insensitive and disrespectful to customers wielding an authoritarian attitude to enforce mask mandates and other Covid restrictions without exception and without question.
Your two year is crying because he or she is scared and pulled down the mask? Tough, you are kicked off the flight. An older person is having trouble brerathing and takes down the mask to get some much needed air? Tough you are kicked off the flight. No questions, no exceptions. These are not isolated events. They are happening regularly and are easily verifiable. I submit that it is this new “Gestapo like” attitude being displayed by some (NOT ALL) airline personel that is directly responsible for any increase in “incidents” on flights as people are getting sick and tired and rightfully angry at seeing others or they themselves being mistreated.