It’s not uncommon to feel the urge for an airport drink that can help manage your flying anxieties (or boredom). That’s why there are so many airport bars in the country’s busiest airports. But be aware: If you try to bring your own form of liquid relief onto a plane in the form of a nip (or mini) bottle of liquor, you’re going to have a bad time.
That’s what Lucy Yallop found on her flight from Newcastle, England, to Alicante, Spain. She tried to spike her orange juice with a mini of Absolut Vodka she’d brought onto the flight, but was called out by the flight crew. She was greeted by two Spanish police officers and three security guards when she landed, and then had to find a different return flight home.
“I never thought a miniature bottle of vodka would cause so much trouble,” Yallop told Metro. But it did, and, not to sound too much like an alarmist, it can happen to you, too.
Yallop’s trouble started before she even boarded the flight. She bought a mini of vodka in the waiting room, but only got half of it down before she was ushered onto the plane. Yallop and her two friends ordered soft drinks and the steward told them that they couldn’t drink their own alcohol, which wasn’t a problem for Yallop’s friends because they were on antibiotics. But for Yallop, there was half a mini bottle of vodka waiting.
“I knew I shouldn’t, but I knew I had the single measure in my bag and tried to put it in my orange,” Yallop told Metro. “The steward came from nowhere and said, ‘what have you got in your hand?’ It was embarrassing. I didn’t have time to pour it into my orange and he took it from me, put it in my handbag and we all had to put our hand luggage in the overhead lockers”
It was, in Yallop’s words, “a naughty schoolgirl thing” to do. It’s not just on international flights from England to Spain that this can happen, either. Airlines around the world have had it with these mini bottles of alcohol on these not so mini planes. The Electronic Code of Federal Regulations in the United States is explicit when it states that “no person may drink any alcoholic beverage aboard an aircraft unless the certificate holder operating the aircraft has served that beverage to him.” Or her, because women like their on-flight drinks just as much as men do.
“I know I was in the wrong but easyJet’s reaction was so over the top,” Yallop told Metro. “I didn’t even drink it. However, my advice to anyone is do not attempt to drink your own alcohol on a plane, no matter how little.”
Sage advice indeed.
