It’s always happy hour at the airport bar, but Ryanair’s CEO is calling for a crackdown on 6am tipples: ‘Who needs to be drinking beer at that time?’

Airports are the place where outside rules suddenly cease to exist. Beyondthe security gates and ID checkpoints, inhibitions loosen and time flows differently. Part of this is by design, from long corridors to the conspicuous absence of clocks, and the hour of the day doesn’t seem as important once inside the terminal. And if it doesn’t matter whether it’s 6 o’clock in the a.m. or the p.m., then it follows that there mustn’t be anything wrong with stopping at the airport bar for a quick pre-flight drink. But Michael O’Leary, CEO of Irish budget carrier Ryanair, would beg to differ. “I fail to understand why anybody in airports bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning. Who needs to be drinking beer at that time?” O’Leary told the Times in an interview published Tuesday. According to O’Leary, airports have effectively delegated to airlines the consequences of early morning happy hour—namely, rowdy passengers boarding flights while less than lucid. “It’s becoming a real challenge for all airlines,” O’Leary said, explaining disruptive behavior has become so commonplace Ryanair now has to divert a flight almost every day because of it. “We are reasonably responsible, but the ones who are not responsible—the ones who are profiteering off it—are the airports who have these bars open at five or six o’clock in the morning,” he said. Flying’s guilt-free ritual Ryanair is Europe’s largest low-cost carrier, and primarily serves destinations on the continent and in North Africa. Though unruly passenger incidents, and airlines executives’ complaints, are hardly contained to one side of the Atlantic. In the U.K., around two-thirds of travelers consider getting a drink before boarding their flight, according to a 2023 survey commissioned by Heathrow, London’s primary international airport. But a remarkable number of Americans are tempted by that departure terminal barstool as well, regardless of what the clocks say. Of people who drink while they travel, 7