Guess I picked the wrong week to give up drinking

Taking a plane was, once, an exercise in projected sophistication, where even the most proletariat of us felt like Cary Grant at the mere possession of a boarding pass. But that all changed when everyone decided to get in on it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: travel brings out the worst in everyone, rendering modern air travel considerably less of the glamfest it once was. Once you've survived the public humiliation of walking barefoot through a full body scanner, your beltless trousers displaying that you're too cheap to actually buy Calvin Klein underwear, you must then witness the utter desperation of "speedy boarding" as families leg it for the departure gate...despite being transferred to the plane by bus. This is then followed by gittish overhead locker space hogging (avoiding selling a kidney just to put a bag in the hold) before taking a seat in a row so tight even regularly-sized people need a boarding pass for each buttock. And all that before being charged the equivalent of Uruguay's national debt for a half tub of Pringles while suffering spine-shattering mid-air turbulence caused by global warming, which has itself been contributed to by all this flying.

Air travel is hell, so it's no surprise that people turn up for flights not-so elegantly wasted or break open their duty-free tequila as soon as the seatbelt signs are turned off. However, as bossy teachers (if I can use that brand) used to say, "there's always one who spoils it for the others". Actually, it's more than one - hen parties and rugby club tours, mostly, who seem unable to fly an hour or so on CheapyJet to Tallinn or Puerto Banus without first consuming a weekend's worth of grog before they've even left the airport bar. Which is not what airport bars are for.

Pre-flight drinking used to be part of the glamour. An exotic cocktail in the company of interesting, erudite international travellers, or a couple of strong ones to calm the nerves of the nervous flyer, or a romantic glass of champagne to get the honeymoon off to a gooey-eyed start. But, no. Despite airports being partially designed to encourage drinking via concourse bars and duty-free shops, the trouble is that too many people are availing themselves too much.

In February, a six-man stag party flying to Bratislava from Luton was arrested after brawling onboard the plane, leading to it being diverted to Berlin. A month later a group of 24 Irish men were thrown off a flight to Costa Rica after allegedly becoming "drunk and abusive" as it waited for takeoff at Gatwick Airport. In May a woman found to be "unresponsive" and slumped in her seat was ordered off an easyJet plane to Paphos before it had even left Manchester Airport...punching the pilot in the process, forcing the airline to replace him, delaying the flight further. And it's not just those 'turning right' at the aircraft door causing trouble: last December, Finnish dress designer Leena Romu attacked a flight attendant as she was boarding a Virgin plane to Dubai, "noticeably unsteady on her feet" and clutching bottles (plural) of duty-free. She was flying First Class.

By and large these are isolated incidents, but the increasing regularity with which they are being reported appears to be enough for Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Aviation, to decide to look into doing something about it. "If you’re a young family travelling on a plane you want to go from point A to B, you don’t want to be disrupted," Ahmad said last week (and good that the UK's aviation minister gets the concept of travelling from one place to another...). He does, though, have a point. "I don’t think we want to kill merriment altogether," he added, "but I think it’s important that passengers who board planes are also responsible and have a responsibility to other passengers, and that certainly should be the factor which we bear in mind."

In 30-plus years of frequent flying I've been rarely troubled by boozy passengers: there was my first ever long-haul flight, to Los Angeles, when I stupidly picked seat 52A of a Virgin Atlantic 747. Not only was I in the smoking section (remember those? Not fun on a 13-hour flight...), but I was sat next to a chain-smoking, G&T-guzzling bit-part actor heading home. He had a grand sounding name (and is still active - I've checked), who told me he'd been in the soap All My Children and episodes of Murder She Wrote. There very nearly was a murder in seat 52B as "Claude" continuously ordered more to drink as he rattled on about Angela Landsbury and Cabot Cove until, thankfully, passing out somewhere over Canada. That, and a pair of American technology salesmen (identified by their tan chinos, golf shirts and loud voices) sat in front of me on a recent British Airways flight from London to Paris, and managed to get loaded on tiny bottles of wine in just the 45 minutes we were in the air, is about it. Perhaps I've been lucky or, perhaps, these incidents have been blown out of proportion by the press. But police statistics obtained under a freedom of information request have shown that over the last two years more than 400 people have been arrested on suspicion of being drunk on flights in the UK.

Out of 250 million passengers handled by British airports each year, that may not sound a lot, but if one of those 400 disrupted your holiday, you'd be justifiably annoyed. And it's something the airlines themselves say needs to be tackled. It is certainly enough of a nuisance problem for the British Government to consider action. A first step would be identifying whether or not the current rules do enough to prevent a bit of fun turning into something more serious. Currently, bars at British airports are allowed to be open according to the earliest and latest flights of the day, a common practice at most airports around the world, and in the case of London's Gatwick, for example, means the taps are open as early as 4am for those departing on holiday flights.

Furthermore, airport bars are not subjected to the same licensing restrictions as pubs, bars and restaurants on the outside, and can, in theory, be open 24 hours a day. This, says Lord Ahmad, is something that "needs to be looked at". Last week the new UK Aviation Industry Code of Practice on Disruptive Passengers was published and included guidance to cabin crew that duty-free booze shouldn't be opened in-flight, and that terminal bars should stop selling alcohol to passengers showing signs of drunkeness (which, I thought, was already the case, along with check-in desk personnel being trained to spot - and smell - drunken behaviour). New rules will mean that any alcohol bought in duty-free shops should be stored on flights away from passengers or in bags that should remain sealed for the duration of the flight. At present, it would appear, nothing prevents sealed duty-free shopping from being opened once onboard.

"I don't think we want to kill merriment altogether," Ahmad said last week, adding that passengers do "have a responsibility to other passengers". Quite how far the government will go, however is - if you can excuse the pun - up in the air. Simon Calder, travel editor of The Independent, says that any action is unlikely to lead to an outright drinking ban at airports or on planes. "It won't happen with a straightforward booze ban", he told ITV's Good Morning Britain. "There'll be various techniques [the government] will be looking at, such as opening hours and restricting the number of drinks you can have. You may have to have your boarding card scanned or marked so you only have a couple of drinks." Breathalyzing passengers at risk of being drunk might be another possibility, Calder said, and it might be done "on a flight-by-flight basis", given that the same 'party' destinations crop up in the charge sheet of reported incidents.

"With air travel proving more popular than ever, and passenger numbers expected to rise across the whole of the UK in the coming years, now is the time to tackle this problem collectively," said Tim Alderslade, Chief Executive of the British Air Transport Association and Ed Anderson, Chairman of the Airport Operators Association, in a joint statement.

You can't knock their initiative, of course, or indeed the desire of airlines to tackle the problem. But equally you can't help feeling that it is a problem that, while the industry hasn't exactly created it, has certainly benefited from financially in both making air travel more available, and getting people to pay hansomely at airport bars for a few pints too many at Stupid O'Clock in the morning. Perhaps it is time to reign this in.