Another day, another plane chaos story.
This time, it was an incident on a Jet2 flight from Belfast International Airport to the Canary Islands.
A man began screaming incoherently about “the Lord Jesus” while being restrained in the cabin. Footage of the disturbance has, inevitably, gone viral on TikTok.
In the video, the man can be heard shouting loudly from his seat while other passengers gather around to try to intervene and calm him down.
The disruptive passenger shouted, “You have to fasten your seatbelt… in the Lord of Jesus,” before letting out a loud yell.
Airline staff have been praised for going “above and beyond” to stop the situation descending even further into chaos — and rightly so.
But can you imagine how disturbing it was for people stuck on that flight, especially for the children on board?
Hurtling through the air at 30,000 feet, locked into the plane cabin — already a fairly cramped and claustrophobic space at the best of times — while some stranger has a noisy meltdown.
Not a great way to start your holiday in the sun.
It reminded me of another incident, which happened a few years ago, also on a Jet2 plane.
This time, it was a flight from London Stansted to Dalaman in Turkey.
A 25-year-old woman, Chloe Haines, was presented with a £85,000 bill by Jet2 after she created a terrifying situation on board.
According to an eyewitness, she sent a flight attendant “flying across the plane” and screamed: “I am going to kill everyone.”
Haines also tried to open the aircraft door and to force her way into the cockpit. The flight diverted back to Stansted, accompanied by two RAF Typhoon fighter jets.
It wasn’t clear if alcohol was involved in this incident — although it was reported that Haines had been banned from the roads for drink-driving just two weeks before the incident.
Neither is it clear whether alcohol was a factor in the agitated man’s behaviour on the recent flight from Belfast to Fuerteventura.
But, let’s face it, it often is.
Every time you read about the police being called to escort a disruptive passenger from a flight, you think: were they hammered?
Unruly passengers affect all personnel involved in the process connected with a flight (Gareth Fuller/PA)
Alcohol and flying are a crazy combination. Getting thoroughly tanked up before a flight, whether it’s scheduled for 8pm at night or 8am in the morning, practically guarantees rowdy chaos of one kind or another, even if nobody is yelling about the Lord Jesus or threatening to bring down the plane.
God help the other passengers, who are about to be herded into a flying cattle pen with these boozers, the cabin rapidly filling with the high-decibel roar of a Saturday night at Wetherspoons.
On one occasion, I had the misfortune to be sitting at the back of an early-morning flight during which a drunken man, who was part of a stag party, staggered repeatedly to the loo in order to vomit with what I can only describe as operatic zeal.
He swooped up to the high notes like Pavarotti. I could hear him very clearly through the thin partition wall — but then so could everyone else because he didn’t bother to shut the toilet door.
It seems incredible to me that airports can quite legitimately sell glasses of booze to passengers at the crack of dawn.
I mean, who needs to down a double whiskey at 7am?
Airlines have a duty to protect the majority of civilised, law-abiding passengers from the minority of selfish idiots who turn up drunk out of their skulls and still expecting to fly.
If somebody is having trouble making it up the aircraft stairs, then that’s a big clue that they shouldn’t be allowed to board.
One possible solution, suggested by the veteran travel writer Simon Calder, is for ground staff at the departure gate to breathalyse passengers who are suspected of being over the drink-driving limit (35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath).
As Calder notes, this corresponds to about two pints of beer, or two glasses of wine, or two double-measures of spirits for men, though it’s less for women.
Apparently this is regarded as a reasonable limit for a passenger.
And why not get rid of alcohol on planes altogether?
It seems incredible that people once lit up cigarettes as soon as the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign was turned off, filling the cabin with a carcinogenic fug of smoke.
Maybe one day we’ll marvel that we ever thought that alcohol and flying was a safe and sensible combination.