United Restarts Onboard Sales of Hard Liquor

Today’s the day.

After announcing last month it would resume the sale of hard liquor, United Airlines today, Monday, November 15, did just that for flights longer than 301 miles to the domestic U.S., Canada and Latin markets.

The carrier made the decision despite an overwhelming amount of onboard incidents and physical altercations between passengers and flight crews this year – more than 5,000 reported to the Federal Aviation Administration, in fact.

Many of those were verbal and due to the face mask mandate, but some were physical and fueled by alcohol consumption.

Just two days ago, in fact, a woman was charged with assault in Dallas after physically attacking a Southwest Airlines operations manager at Love Field, although there was no indication whether the woman was inebriated.

Southwest has actually banned sales of hard liquor into 2022.

But United believes this is the right time to bring back hard liquor sales and that its total number of passenger-flight crew incidents is lower than fellow airlines and relatively low compared to the number of passengers it flies.