The answer is known and has been told, but is lost in a sea of anecdotes. As soon as a plane takes off the laws which apply to it are those of the nation it is registered in, and this continues until it lands. This is not affected by which country its over.
Airline policy on the other hand may vary. They may desist from serving alcohol to “underage” on a flight that commences from the US lest some puritanical idiot accuse them of corrupting the youth. I was in a KLM flight where we were told (before entering Saudi airspace) that no more alcohol would be served as we it was against Saudi law. Err no, Saudi law had no application until we landed, but it was a good policy to have, no need to piss of the locals on the flight.
I don’t get why Coors beer wouldn’t have been served east of the Mississippi. Perhaps some law about passing off urine as beer…
Maybe the plane was flying over dry counties in Mississippi. (This could be a slight tangent to the OP: Plane takes off from an airport in a dry county…or lands in a dry county…or flies over a dry county. What happens then?)
Once again, the law that govern a plane once it takes off the juridiction hence applicable laws are those of the country its registered in. So an Saudi airline plane would (assuming serving alcohol is illegal) be violating the law by serving alcohol even if its flying over the Champange region of France, while Air France (presuming its allowed to serve alcohol) would not be committing a crime when it flys over Saudi airspace.
It changes when you land or before you take off when the host country has juridiction.
yabob, I thought Kansas repealed its prohibition law in 1948, so why was this Vern Miller trying to do that in the 1970s? I’ve heard of him before, but I thought he was earlier in history.
They still prohibited public bars and sale by the drink until 1987. Which they contended made it illegal for the airlines to serve drinks in Kansas airspace.
What do they do with the liquor on board the plane when they land in Saudi Arabia? Isn’t it illegal to even possess alcohol in the country? I don’t expect that the flight crew would be given 40 lashes each for the alcohol on the plane when they land at Riyadh or Jeddah.
No idea how to answer the OP, but when I flew American Airlines to Germany back in 1991 for the military, there was still a smoking section, and they served me all that I wanted despite my being only 19.
For that matter the law in California wasn’t always as strictly observed as it is today. I was below legal age for most of my undergraduate career, but often bought beer on the train while traveling between L.A. and San Diego. Getting wine with dinner in a restaurant was hardly ever a problem either.
Nothing to add as to the legal question, but Pat Conroy makes passing reference in his novel The Great Santini (set in the early Sixties) to Marine aviators cramming bottles of Coors into every spare cubic inch of their jets whenever they were on the West Coast, and then flying it back east for themselves and their buddies.
Which further reminds me about once reading that, during WW2, Army Air Forces bomber pilots stationed in fiercely hot North Africa would, when they got shipments of beer, take it up to 30,000 feet and cruise around for half an hour to chill it, then land and start the party!
