Michael here: Here’s how the sky went dry.

In January, American Airlines issued a press release announcing, with evident pride, that beginning February 1 its passengers could order Athletic Brewing’s Free Wave Hazy IPA, the company’s first non-alcoholic beer served in flight, because the stuff was selling too well in the Flagship and Admirals Club lounges to ignore. The release had the cheerful tone of all airline announcements, and it passed without much comment, which is a shame, because buried in its corporate optimism was an obituary.

The Admirals Club, a room invented in 1939 so that men of consequence could drink Scotch between flights, a room whose entire premise was that air travel and alcohol were natural companions, had been moving so much non-alcoholic beer that the airline decided to stock it on the planes.

To understand what died, you have to understand how strange the institution was while it lived. For most of the twentieth century, commercial aviation was the one corner of respectable American life where drinking before noon required no explanation. A man who ordered two martinis at 9:40 in the morning anywhere else was a man with a problem; the same man on the LaGuardia-to-Chicago run was simply a passenger. The airlines did not tolerate this customer. They built their product around him, and the reason wasn’t culture. It was the government.

Until 1978, Washington told every airline what it could charge. A ticket to Chicago cost the same on every carrier, so the only way to win a customer was everything around the ticket: the food, the legroom, and above all the pour. Booze was the in-flight entertainment before screens existed. When the government fixes your prices, the bar cart becomes your marketing department. Decades before T-Pain turned buying a stranger a drink into a number-one record, the airlines were running the same play at scale, with better real estate and a captive audience.

The industry pursued this logic to conclusions that now read as deranged. In the nineteen-seventies, the upper decks of Boeing 747s were converted into full-scale cocktail lounges; Continental operated a pub, and American installed a piano bar in coach, where the difficulty of keeping a real piano in tune through turbulence led the airline to choose electric Wurlitzer organs instead.

Somewhere in Texas, in other words, executives at a major carrier held meetings about which keyboard instrument best survived a hard landing, in service of a livelier happy hour at cruising altitude. Qantas fitted its upper deck with the Captain Cook Lounge, all teak and brass, where passengers gathered over cocktails and Bundaberg rum. Pan Am served caviar from ice sculptures and poured champagne without end. We remember this period as the golden age of air travel, and we tend to credit the legroom. The gold was mostly liquor.

Deregulation killed the lounges and shrank the seats, but the drinking culture survived by retreating to the ground, where it held its most durable fortress: the airport bar, the last public space in America where a beer at seven in the morning carried no social penalty whatsoever. In Britain the sanctuary was written into law. The law that governs every pub in England simply stops at the security checkpoint. Parliament looked at the departure lounge and decided the clock shouldn’t count in there.

Country radio canonized the whole arrangement as late as 2014, when Dierks Bentley took “Drunk on a Plane” to number one on the airplay chart. Nobody heard it as a eulogy at the time.

What killed all of this was not a campaign. It was arithmetic. Gallup now finds that 54 percent of Americans drink at all, the lowest figure in the firm’s nearly ninety-year trend, and the slide has been fast rather than gradual: 62 percent in 2023, 58 percent in 2024, 54 percent in 2025. For a quarter century that number barely moved. Then it lost eight points in three years. The collapse is generational.

Adults under thirty-five, who two decades ago drank more than any other group, are down to 50 percent, and even the people still drinking have throttled back, averaging 2.8 drinks per week, the lowest Gallup has recorded since 1996. That is fewer than three drinks a week, which works out to one glass of wine at Sunday dinner and one mistake on a Tuesday. Only 24 percent of drinkers had touched alcohol in the previous day, another record low, which means the daily drink, the load-bearing wall of the entire cocktail-hour civilization, is functionally extinct.

And people didn’t just stop drinking. They changed their minds about it. Fifty-three percent of Americans now consider moderate drinking bad for their health, up from 28 percent in 2018, and a mere 6 percent still believe it does them any good. The glass-of-red-wine-for-the-heart consensus that underwrote four decades of comfortable consumption has been formally abandoned; the Surgeon General’s 2025 advisory said flat out that alcohol causes at least seven cancers, including breast, colorectal, liver, and esophageal.

Even the last respectable excuse for the airborne drink, the nightcap that helps you sleep on the red-eye, has been clinically dismantled. A 2024 study in the journal Thorax tested alcohol against simulated cabin pressure and found that you sleep worse, your blood carries less oxygen, and your heart works overtime all night. The drink that was supposed to soften the flight makes your body run uphill at altitude.

And this is no longer a self-improvement fad with a January expiration date. Circana found that half of American adults now say they’re trying to drink less, and that group has grown by almost half in just two years, with 58 percent of Gen Z citing mental health as the reason. NIAAA research on temporary-abstinence challenges found half of young participants drinking less afterward and 15 percent never going back.

Non-alcoholic beer, wine, and spirits crossed a billion dollars in U.S. off-premise sales in 2025, and IWSR, the research firm the liquor industry pays to tell it the truth, projects global consumption to keep falling past 2031 and to sit below today’s levels in 2035, even as the world adds 9 percent more drinking-age adults. More drinkers, less drinking. The industry is no longer planning for a dip. It is planning for a smaller world.

Even the pop charts, alcohol’s most loyal marketing channel, tell the story if you listen closely. The hits of the 2000s were drinking songs in the imperative mood: T-Pain buying rounds, Jamie Foxx assigning the blame to the bottle, Rihanna toasting the weekend on Jameson. She gave the whole thing its civic slogan: “Cheers to the freakin’ weekend.” Even the heartbreak songs kept the ritual intact: “Take a shot for me,” Drake crooned. 

The command was simple: “Blame it on the alcohol.” Nobody needed a second meaning. Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank)” was written as a warning about peer pressure and inherited alcoholism, and clubs played it as a toast anyway. Then the songs started sounding less like celebration and more like aftermath. 

By 2013, not even Justin Timberlake, a man discovering the drink had stopped working, “could drink it away”. The biggest bar anthem of this decade is a different animal. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” tied the all-time Hot 100 record with nineteen weeks at number one in 2024, and it runs on an interpolation of J-Kwon’s “Tipsy,” a club hit from 2004: a drinking song about remembering drinking songs, sung by a narrator who is at the bar because he cannot afford his life: “My baby want a Birkin…this nine-to-five ain't workin'”. The first line of the biggest drinking song in twenty years is a complaint about work. The culture’s last great toast turned out to be a wake.

The aviation industry counts everything, so it noticed early, and its responses tell you who the new customer is. The first response was prohibitionist, from the unlikeliest source: Ryanair has publicly demanded that airports ban alcohol sales before 10 a.m. and cap passengers at two drinks per boarding pass. Ryanair charges for printing a boarding pass. When the airline whose business model is the monetization of human discomfort decides that drunk passengers cost more than they spend, the actuarial verdict on the airborne cocktail is in. The regulator agrees.

The FAA, which has always barred airlines from boarding visibly intoxicated passengers, logged 915 unruly-passenger cases in the first five months of 2024, 106 of them attributed to intoxication, and in May of this year it proposed a $165,000 fine against Alaska Airlines for allegedly letting intoxicated passengers board eleven separate flights. The drink that was once the product is now a line item in the legal department’s risk register.

The second response was flattery. American introduced mocktails built on turmeric, ginger, and elderberry in its Admirals Clubs, and across the industry, lounges that once led with self-serve wine and liquor displays now headline their menus with zero-proof cocktails, premium teas, and infused waters, the décor of the executive watering hole giving way to something closer to a med spa with gate announcements.

There is a standard story about how institutions die, involving scandal, or reform, or a decisive vote. The two-martini flight got none of these. It survived decades of unruly-passenger headlines and every temperance revival of the twentieth century, because attack was never the threat. The threat was a generation that boarded with wellness apps on their phones and fitness trackers on their wrists and found the whole ritual faintly embarrassing, the way one regards a parent’s cigarette habit.

What collapsed was never the drink itself; alcohol remains legal, available, and aggressively marketed. What collapsed was the permission around it, society’s agreement that the normal rules paused between gates. The new passengers never asked for permission because they didn’t want the thing it permitted. An institution can survive its enemies. It cannot survive a customer who, offered the most socially protected drink in American life, looks at the cart and orders the hop water.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, home of Massif & Kroo. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine, writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he focused on building permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends in business, media and aviation. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com

Email: [email protected]

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