United Airlines is selling hard liquor again to its passengers. In a statement, the company announced that the decision was made “in response to the feedback we’ve received from both customers and flight attendants.”
The miniature bottles of spirits will be sold in Economy class via contactless payment on flights over 300 miles along routes in the U.S., Canada and Latin America.
United had stopped selling alcohol during the pandemic. In November of 2020, the airline reported that it would bring back the sale of beer, wine and seltzers.
Some airlines, such as Southwest and American, took the decision to ban alcohol on their flights until at least 2022. This was linked to a sharp increase in reported incidents involving unruly passengers
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it had referred 37 of the “most serious” cases of unruly airline passengers to the FBI for a criminal case review.
The FAA has seen an unprecedented number of unruly passenger reports in 2021. In January of 2021, the FAA instituted its “Zero Tolerance” policy which has generated a proposed total amount of fines over $1 million. As of early November, there had already been 5,114, with 3,710 of them being mask-related.
The FAA announced in early autumn that the 2021 rate of unruly passengers had dropped by roughly 50% since the creation of the Zero Tolerance policy, to roughly six incidents per every 10,000 flights.
According to CNN, the FAA announced in early November fines against 10 violent airline passengers totaling $225,287, the second biggest announcement of fines for unruly passengers since the no-tolerance policy was enacted.
