A drunk British Airways flight attendant was allegedly so desperate for another drink during a boozy overnight layover in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that she flashed her breasts and propositioned the barman in the hope of getting a free bottle of wine to take back to her hotel room.
According to The Sun, the incident reportedly occurred last month when a group of four flight attendants arrived at the airline’s layover hotel in Belfast at around 9 pm following a long duty day or short-haul flights around Europe.
Keen to wind down and socialise, the crew headed straight to the hotel bar for a drink. By 1 am, the group was still chatting away in the bar, despite the fact that the bar staff was tidying up and closing down for the evening.
One of the female crew members headed to the bar for one last drink and was told that service had finished. At that point, she allegedly lifted up her top, exposing her breasts, and said to the barman: “What if I let you have a go on these funbags?”
The barman not only refused to accept the proposition but reported the flight attendant to managers, who, in turn, informed British Airways of the incident.
British Airways immediately suspended the entire crew of four flight attendants, and had to dispatch a new set of crew to Belfast to bring back the plane they should have been working on the following day.
The airline has confirmed that it is investigating the incident, with a spokesperson noting: “We expect the highest standards from our crew.”
While that might be BA’s expectation, its crew certainly has a history of letting the airline down, with a long list of past misdemeanours attributed to drunken antics by flight attendants and pilots.
The extensive number of incidents is, at this point, getting too numerous to list, but includes:
- In 2022, British Airways aircrew were banned from buying an all-inclusive package at a luxury hotel in the Maldives after a newbie flight attendant was found collapsed and drunk on a beach at the resort.
- A year later, a British Airways flight attendant was arrested for being drunk and possibly even high on drugs during a flight from Gran Canaria to London Gatwick.
- That same year, a British Airways pilot was terminated after it was discovered that he had been snorting cocaine off a prostitute’s breasts during a layover in South Africa.
- And last year, a British Airways flight attendant was found by his colleagues dancing naked in the lavatory of an Airbus A380, high on drugs, following a layover in San Francisco.
Last month, Japan Airlines imposed a total alcohol ban on flight attendants during layovers after one of its cabin managers was found to be over the alcohol limit just before a return domestic flight from Hiroshima to Tokyo.
Japan Airlines has been rocked by several alcohol-related scandals, including one in which a pilot was suspended after he became rowdy in the lobby of a Dallas hotel during a layover.
It’s unlikely, however, that British Airways will impose its own alcohol ban owing to differing employment laws. Under UK law, flight crew cannot drink any alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty.
Even then, however, their blood alcohol level cannot exceed 9 micrograms per 100 millilitres of blood.
