Ryanair can stick its two-drinks rule – budget airlines fashioned mile-high louts in the first place

The likes of Michael O’Leary have democratised travel, but at what uncivilised, bullying and inhumane price? I need a tipple just to cope

Is Michael O’Leary turning into the Once-ler? The boss of Ryanair, who joined the company in 1988, four years after it was founded (he became CEO in 1994), appears to lament the monster he has created. You’ll recall the Once-ler, that Dr Seuss character, who, hounded by the Lorax, turns his Thneed business into a polluting cash machine. “Business is business! And business must grow,” he cries as he goes on “biggering and biggering and biggering” his enterprise. This, in spite of the environmental destruction being wrought and the contempt he has for his customers. “You never can tell what some people will buy,” he scoffs.
And thus we have poor Mr O’Leary this week, casting a glance at the drunken louts who weekly stagger onto his aeroplanes. The worse-for-wear, having sipped heavily from the moment they made it through customs, right themselves as they queue to get on the plane but, once safely in the air, get loud and leary with staff and passengers. “In the old days, people who drank too much would eventually fall over or fall asleep,” he said, adding, “but now those passengers are also on tablets and powder.” Which does seem a logistical challenge to me. Surely even these idiots wouldn’t risk getting busted carrying class A drugs as they go through security; so if he’s right, they must be pre-loading (pre-snorting, pre-popping?) and that kind of planning is inconceivably degenerate.
Now O’Leary, shuddering at the horrors infecting his aircraft, has been weighing up how to tackle the problem. If the louts are visibly, unpleasantly drunk then his staff can and do prevent them from boarding planes but, says the Ryanair boss, “as long as they can stand up and shuffle they will get through.” So his answer? To restrict passengers to two drinks per boarding pass. Which is an almighty level of heavy-handed collective punishment.
And his idea comes just as many UK airports lift the 100ml liquid restriction on hand luggage. Quite how one mixes honey with toothpaste, Sudocrem and sun cream to make a bomb has always escaped me but it was a joy last weekend to discover that Bristol Airport and its associated airlines are now willing to risk it. 
Not that I escaped a frisking and neither did our three-year-old, who had his little fingers swabbed (I did tell him not to touch my Semtex) and my case emerged from the X-ray machine and got diverted down the naughty lane and some wretched security person then ruined all my neat packing in a vain search for, as it turned out, nothing.
The authorities and airlines conspire to make the flying experience and the lead-up to it as miserable as possible. There are rip-off car parks, outrageous fees to simply collect or drop people off, penny pinching charges to use a trolley, and then, hideous queues aside, there are those rituals of mini humiliation as we must remove our belts and shoes.
The budget airlines, as we well know, are anything but budget these days once you realise you need to pay for extras like luggage. And how foolish we all were thinking the payment for a flight might include a seat!
And then we get caught in what seems like a vortex of small print. Flying from Bristol to the Isle of Man last Friday, I made the lamentable decision to avoid the bag check queue and go straight to security. We were already checked-in, the tickets were in my iPhone wallet. All our bags were those designed to fit in the overhead lockers so, having traversed the evil, tempting snake route that is duty free we strode on merrily to the gate. At which point we were asked to pop our cases in that bag-sizing thing (“you’ve paid for under-seat luggage only”). Obviously the two overhead ones wouldn’t fit. But they made us try anyway, like making a 20-stone person limbo dance under a bar six inches off the floor.
Having failed the test we had to pay £48 per case to have them checked into the hold. Even though, on entering the plane, it was clear the flight wasn’t full and there was plenty of space in the overhead lockers.
We then sat in the plane and waited because the pilot, who had waltzed past us in the queue in dark glasses thinking he was Tom Cruise but more resembled Mr Bean, told us that co-pilot Eliot was running late, stuck in traffic.
“He’s on the bus now, give him a cheer when he arrives,” the captain implored. Mr Grumpy here refused to applaud Eliot’s incompetence particularly in light of their bullying intransigence. On the way back two teenagers were in tears at the gate as their cases didn’t fit either. “Just let the kids through,” I was too pathetic to say to them.
And now, to add to the misery, O’Leary wants us to zap our tickets on some automated drinks purveyor to check we’re not too squiffy to travel.
Yes, he and his “low-cost” airlines have democratised travel but at what uncivilised, bullying and inhumane price? I need a drink just to cope with all that hideousness. And not just two.
O’Leary used to be keen on rinsing us on board to keep his coffers full, selling as many drinks as possible. “If drink sales are falling off we get the pilots to engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes up the drink sales,” he once said. But having tempted the stag and hen parties to fill his Boeing 737s, he’s aghast at their being schnockered.
As the Once-ler says at the end of the story: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” So I’ll say this for Michael O’Leary: he’s a terrific advert for a British staycation.