Drunk Woman Abuses Fellow Passengers on Flight from Hurghada

It has emerged that a woman on-board a flight from Hurghada to Birmingham, United Kingdom, verbally abused fellow passengers and cabin crew after drinking too much alcohol.

Sharon O’Donaghue, 45, was travelling on March 12th, taking advantage of the on-board drinks service. According to the Daily Mail, after being served her first glass of wine, she had appeared “perfectly genial and was exchanging pleasantries with others.”

The situation began to escalate, however, after she purchased two 1 litre bottles of Bacardi rum from duty-free, and proceeded to request a second glass of wine from the bar. A member of the cabin crew suspected that she was drunk as she was stumbling, and noticed that a quarter of one of the bottles of rum had disappeared.

The cabin crew member spoke to her manager, and when they asked whether O’Donaghue has consumed the rum, she replied, “no, I have spilled it on my bad foot.”

O’Donaghue then started to become aggressive, asking if the manager spoke Arabic or Turkish. She replied in Turkish. Richard Franck, a Birmingham Crown Court prosecutor, said that by this time, “other passengers were starting to get disturbed, and some were taking recordings on their mobile phones.”

Her behaviour was such that it reduced an elderly woman to tears. A police officer later explained that the woman was crying, “please don’t let me see her.”

Reports tell how a gentleman approached O’Donaghue, who responded by calling him a “fat paedophile.” The man stated that she also recorded his six month-old daughter.

Meanwhile, the cabin crew member offered O’Donaghue some tea – and was told to ‘stick’ it.

Franck explained that O’Donaghue then began disturbing passengers who were trying to sleep, shouted at the manager “I will have you”, and then used her phone to film other passengers. She moved her phone close to one target, and told them they were “smelly.”

O’Donaghue was moved to another seat after complaints were made against her, and when the plane landed she was arrested, continuing to shout and swear as she was led through immigration to a police car.

It seems that this is not the first time O’Donaghue has been intoxicated on an aircraft, however. When interviewed at Solihull police station, she admitted that she had drunk some of the alcohol, and that it has “affected her more than it normally would.”

She has since been sentenced to a 12-month community order, and has been ordered to complete 100 hours of unpaid work. Recorder Patrick Upward QC stated of her endeavours, “You have upset a lot of people, people who are frightened enough getting on an aeroplane without idiots like you.”

This is not the first time a drunk passenger has caused mischief, indeed,  a plane going to Egypt from Warsaw in 2015 made an emergency landing in Bulgaria when an intoxicated passenger claimed there might have been a bomb on the plane.