IT’S TIME TO GROUND THE DRUNKEN YOBS

YOU might not imagine that 30 drunk men are particularly hard to spot in a confined space like, say, an airport departure gate.

And it is certainly true that plenty of people in the vicinity of the gate for flight FR6605 from Edinburgh to Ibiza did manage to clock the unruly 30 and their ‘staggeringly bad’ behaviour last Wednesday.

Unfortunately for them, they were fellow passengers who have no power to stop sloshed people getting on board.

They merely have to suffer the consequences of their boorishness when the plane is in the sky.

The ones who, it appears, completely missed the fact that a huge party of sozzled stag-do revellers was queuing to board the Ryanair flight were the ground crew whose job it happens to be to ensure all passengers are in a fit state to fly.

These men clearly were not, as the alltoo predictable chaos that followed on board, 35,000ft up, bore out.

There are only two ways to solve this maddening issue for sober passengers and I’m afraid neither of them is pretty. Either ban all alcohol from all airports and aircraft or actually get serious about turning drunken people away at departure gates.

You paid £1,000 for your holiday? Too bad, the p **** d shall not pass.

Have the police come and break the news to the boozers if the ground crew are too afraid to do it.

What demonstrably does not work is turning a blind eye to avoid the hassle. Yet that is the drunk flier’s charter which exists today.