On a domestic flight last night, my wife and I finished the ice water we’d been served, then we each poured a 50ml serving of scotch (which my wife had carried on in her purse) over the leftover ice.
A flight attendant came down the aisle collecting trash, and as my wife deposited the two tiny bottles he said to her, “You know you’re not allowed to bring your own booze on a plane, it’s illegal.” To which she replied, “No, I didn’t know that.” The FA said, “Well, you’ll know for next time,” and went on his way. At no time, however, did he or anybody else try to take our drinks away or stop us from consuming them. We’ve done this plenty of times before and never tried to hide it, and nobody has said a word about it until this time.
So I decided to check it out, and the TSA website says this:
Not a word, though, about actually drinking said alcohol on board.
Additional googling found mostly the same information on various sites, including some of the airlines’ own, but the question about drinking carried-on liquor remains mostly unanswered. The only page I found that seems to back up the FA’s assertion was on something called eHow.com:
You’ll surely forgive me if I don’t accept this site I’d never heard of as the final word on the subject. Seems to me that if this is indeed illegal, nobody is going out of their way to tell people about this or to enforce it. Anybody know the real Straight Dope?
I can’t seem to find anything definitive on this either.
I’ve found a few other “cites” similar to yours, with people on the internet claiming that it’s illegal, but not offering any actual evidence except their own words.
Another possibility that occurred to me was that the flight attendant was confusing “illegal” with “against the rules.” It’s possible that it’s legal to drink your own alcohol on a flight, but that it’s also against the airline’s own rules. But a search of three different airline websites (Delta, Southwest, United) turned up no rules about consuming your own alcohol on a plane.
Interesting…on one of my spring break trips to Acapulco (from Canada), “someone” cracked a bottle and passed it around the plane. The flight attendants became quite irate and reported us to the pilot who announced over the P.A. that consuming alcohol on the flight was illegal and whoever was responsible was to stash it immediately and no further action would be taken.
So I looked it up, Canadian Aviation Regulations state…
I think your interpretation is incorrect.
(a) No person may drink any alcoholic beverage aboard an aircraft unless the certificate holder operating the aircraft has served that beverage to him.
I would read this as you can only consume the alcoholic beverages that are supplied by the operator of the aircraft.
“(a) No person may drink any alcoholic beverage aboard an aircraft unless the certificate holder operating the aircraft has served that beverage to him.”
It says nothing about where the alcohol came from, only that you may only drink it if it is SERVED to you by the certificate holder (steward). Since we know it is legal to bring liquor on board sealed, the above sentence makes it seem that it is okay to give your sealed alcohol to the steward and have them serve it to you.
If a flight attendant tells you directly not to do something, then continuing to do it could (at least technically, if not usually in practice) wind up getting you charged with “Interfering With a Flight Crew” as some guy found out earlier today, when he was arrested for turning on his i-Phone while the flight was still taxiing to the gate after landing, despite repeatedly being told to turn it off by the flight attendant…
Think of the airplane as a long skinny bar with unpleasant seats. Whether it’s on the ground or in the air, there’s a gaggle of laws regarding the legal and proper service of alcoholic beverages.
Would you expect to get hollered at by the bartender if you pulled a bottle of booze out of your pocket and started drinking it? At most bars, you’d get a stern warning at the least, and quite likely, shown the door. Same thing in the air, except as noted above, you could be looking at charges of interfering with the flight crew, which is a bit of a catch-all, but the end result is you’re being grilled by the Feds for a while. Not my idea of a good way to end a flight.
OTOH, if you keep that bottle in your pocket and didn’t touch it at any time you’re at the bar, the bartender or server won’t know and won’t care.
Except the OP is trying to figure out what is LEGAL in the air, not what will be against the airline rules. The stewardess specifically claimed it was illegal to drink their own alcohol.
Whatever the rule, it’s been around for quite some time. Calvin Trillin wrote about it in a book published in 1978 (“But surely the rule wasn’t meant to apply to a Chateau Margaritte '73!”).
roger - legal is whatever the airlines say is against the rules. “Interfering With a Flight Crew,” remember? That makes disobeying any rules the airline makes illegal.
That’s a good point. But the thread title says “Is it illegal to drink your own alcohol on a plane?” which I read to mean “barring airline regulations is the act of drinking your own alcohol on a plane illegal?”
The stewardess who told him he couldn’t drink his own alcohol because it was illegal obviously meant it that way instead of a “interfering with the flight clue is illegal” sense of the word (assuming the OP was not on a vodka-fuelled rampage at the time! )
You are correct, and if the flight attendant had said “I’ll need to take those from you” or “Sorry, we can’t let you drink that,” we surely would have complied. Just the ambiguous “You’ll know for next time” and then he left us to enjoy our libations in peace.
My suspicion is that if we’d gotten plastered and caused a disturbance, that we – and probably the FA for not stopping us after he’d discovered our crime – could have gotten in big trouble. But he made a judgement call that we weren’t going to cause any problems with our ounce and a half of sippin’ scotch and decided to be cool about it.
As I said in the OP, we’ve handed empty liquor bottles to flight attendants before with no verbal admonishments, and honestly had no inkling we were doing anything illicit.
There was a case in New Mexico where a passenger had been over-served during a flight (meaning that he had been allowed to consume alcohol far past the legal limit of .08 BAC). Once the plane landed in Albuquerque, this passenger either rented a car or retrieved his own vehicle, ended up on the wrong side of I-40, and plowed into a carload of people killing some or all…can’t quite remember.
In this case, the flight crew and the airline were held responsible because the law in NM is that the seller/provider of the alcohol is directly responsible for intoxication levels of consumers. I can imagine that after this particular event, flight crew members might be a little extra cautious about how much alcohol is being consumed during any given flight. Allowing people to bring and consume their own alcohol would make it pretty much impossible to monitor intoxication levels.
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