Implying That Unruly Air Passengers Are Getting Worse (Or Blaming Alcohol) Doesn’t Make It True

You’d probably be hard-pressed at this point to find many passengers who see air travel in the U.S. as anything but a nightmare proposition of inconveniences and social hazards, something that Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy recently and insultingly suggested could be addressed by passengers simply ditching their sweatpants and dressing more nicely. It’s precisely because so many of us have come to loathe getting on board a plane, however, that vibes-based reporting about the experience becomes a threat: Give the reader something that they instinctually agree with, and they’re all too happy to overlook a lack of relevant sources or data. That’s what we find in this travel article published today by CNN, which highlights an even more perfidious threat to the flight experience than Duffy’s fears of unwashed pajama pants: Drunk air passengers. The CNN piece leans on anecdotal reports and undeniably outdated data (from other countries!) to make its point, while not even bothering to cite relevant, up-to-date statistics on either unruly flyers or U.S. alcohol consumption. It merely settles for: “Drunk flyers; they’re bad, right?”

As someone who has done his fair share of alcohol writing over the years, both in terms of chronicling drinking culture or history, or writing in-depth about spirits or cocktails, I can never resist a click when I see a headline along the lines of CNN’s “Everyone agrees drunk plane passengers are a problem. Nobody agrees on how to fix it.” I’m always looking for relevant insights into how alcohol is being incorporated into the fabric of daily life and American society, but with this piece, my expectations immediately began to lower when I saw that the writer hadn’t cited or even mentioned the single biggest narrative to be found in U.S. drinking in 2025: The fact that U.S. drinking has recently reached historic lows by several different metrics. Also seemingly in decline (since the huge 2021 peak) are unruly passenger reports as tracked by the FAA. But why include any of that information when you can instead open with a story credited to a person simply described as “a writer,” who describes watching her seat neighbor running to the bathroom to vomit? Anecdotes for the win!

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The Unruly Skies?

It is true that, in the immediate wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, airlines experienced a powerful (and inconvenient for flyers) surge in reports of angry, unruly, disruptive, violent and yes, probably sometimes drunk passengers. Looking at just the two numbers provided by the FAA of “unruly passenger reports” for 2020 and 2021, you would think that something apocalyptic had happened: 2020 is listed as 1,009 unruly passenger reports, while 2021 shoots up to 5,973, a whopping 492% increase. Lost, however, are some subtleties: According to (ironically also CNN) reporting at the time, 72% of those incidents (almost 4,300 of them) were “mask-related incidents”–in other words, people who were angry (largely MAGA types) that they were being mandated to follow public health guidance and wear a mask, and chose to make public scenes about it. The FAA subsequently instituted tougher penalties, fines and a “zero tolerance” policy, and the number of unruly passenger reports began to sharply drop.

Today, the rate of unruly passenger reports is still significantly elevated from where it was before the pandemic, although it’s not clear if the numbers collected since 2021 can actually be compared with the pre-pandemic data: CNN’s own report from 2022 claims that prior to 2021, the FAA was only recording specifically “the number of unruly passenger incidents that rose to the level of being investigated.” What we can see is a fairly steady downward progression from the big 2021 peak, which in 2024 had declined to 2,096 incidents. For 2025 to date, it’s 1,453, which would seemingly be tracking for another modest decrease, although we are of course headed into the busiest travel window of the year. Still, one would expect 2025 to likely register the smallest number of incidents since before the pandemic … not that you’re likely to know this, given vibes-based reporting like the story in question, or the oft-repeated “airplane fight video” subgenre of social media rage baiting boosted by accounts such as anti-immigration provocateurs. Because we all kind of hate flying these days, these incidents are captured and shared more than ever, making them appear like a problem that is exploding in frequency rather than one that is more likely in decline.

As for the role of alcohol in all this, the CNN report zeroes in on booze as a convenient boogeyman, and manages to cite some questionable or downright strange and anecdotal data points in the process. Although there is some plausible stuff there–such as one cited source speculating that shrinking airline seats/legroom and poor customer service could be linked to more hostility and outbursts in passengers both intoxicated and sober–it is particularly strange that the CNN reporting doesn’t at least acknowledge declining overall U.S. and global drinking rates. In the U.S., Gallup’s annual survey of Americans that tracks the percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol recently registered a shocking result: Only 54% of U.S. adults say they are current alcohol users in 2025, which is quite literally the lowest this figure has ever been since Gallup began tracking it in 1939. It’s also a very statistically significant decline from just a few years ago, when 67% of adults surveyed said that they drank alcohol in 2022.

But that’s the prevalence of people consuming alcohol. Maybe everyone who does drink is now drinking more? Not the case, according to the most recently available data, which suggests that U.S. alcohol consumption has declined by 10% from its 2021 mid-pandemic peak, currently hovering at a level that may be the lowest since 1962. There are myriad potential reasons for these declines, ranging from the simple unaffordability of alcohol as a luxury good in our current economic climate, to the rise of cannabis/THC consumption as an alternate substance through increased legalization, to increased health consciousness or the effects of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. There’s even a potential political element at play, as Donald Trump (whose brother died from an alcoholism-linked heart attack) does not drink, and RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement has often co-opted anti-alcohol posturing into its anti-science, vibes-based platform as a result. Point is, there’s no real data to suggest that any segment of U.S. society is drinking more these days, and the sales numbers bear this out: Whether it’s wine, beer or spirits, it’s pretty much all in decline at the moment.

So. Ozempic reduces alcohol consumption to a degree that is worrying the giant companies. BUT 81% of Wegovy consumption, is by women, whereas 78% of alcohol consumption in the US is by men. Is this another wedge to further open up the chasmic cultural gender divide?

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— Joe Muggs and 8.2 billion others (@joemuggs.bsky.social) Nov 20, 2025 at 3:09 AM

Leave it to CNN, then, to not necessarily state directly in their piece that alcohol-fueled unruly air passenger incidents are specifically increasing, but to instead simply cite outdated sources that are directly making that exact argument. The CNN piece cites a 2018 report from the Institute of Alcohol Studies, a U.K.-based charity that leads off said report with the headline “Drunk, disruptive air passenger numbers on the rise.” Said report goes on to say that “incidents of drunk and disruptive passengers have increased significantly in recent years,” without giving details on what time frame they’re talking about, citing actual numbers behind this apparent increase, or linking to any data from the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority, who supposedly collected that data. And even if they had provided that information, we would be talking about data on in-flight drunk and unruly passengers from years before the COVID-19 pandemic, exclusively on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean … where alcohol consumption is also decreasing, by the way. Hardly seems relevant to a piece of reporting that mostly focuses on the state of alcohol and airline passengers in the U.S. in 2025, does it?

The CNN piece also indulges in some rather odd snippets of anecdotal interviews with aviation industry figures, my favorite of which is European budget carrier Ryanair’s CEO Michael O’Leary, who gives the following musing on aggressive passenger behavior: “In the old days, people who drank too much would eventually fall over or fall asleep. But now those passengers are also on tablets and powder. It’s the mix. You get much more aggressive behavior that becomes very difficult to manage.”

The hell? “Tablets and powder?” What are we even talking about here? Are we saying that there’s been a sudden epidemic of “tablets and powder” use since 2021 that has changed how the usual airport drinkers are behaving, transforming them from contented drunken sleepers into raving derelicts? Did that kind of statement not deserve some kind of context or follow up? Apparently not.

Ironically, the very reason why we’ve become more comfortable in scapegoating alcohol in this type of vibes-based reporting is likely because more Americans now identify as non-drinkers, for the web of aforementioned reasons that run from economics, to health, to the social signifiers of being a teetotaler. Only in a social environment where it’s increasingly acceptable or popular to disparage alcohol use are you likely to see headlines like “Everyone agrees drunk plane passengers are a problem. Nobody agrees on how to fix it.”

But that’s still no excuse for ending your piece by saying that “67% of respondents were in favor of a drink limit at airports, and 64% said they were OK with breathalyzers being used before letting passengers board their flights,” without also mentioning that your survey numbers come from a U.K. anti-alcohol charity, and were gathered in 2018, some seven years ago, before a global pandemic that vastly altered public opinion on nearly every topic imaginable. Not much has changed about the fabric of our daily lives since then, right?

I’m not here to defend the sanctity of alcohol, a substance clearly associated with and favored by problematic individuals since the first time a neolithic man burned down his hut while loaded on fermented fruit. But I’d be lying if I said that this type of reporting about booze didn’t make me want to reach for a drink.