It's hard to believe that international travel was once regarded as being rather glamorous. The term jet set, after all, comes from those who flew by jet. It was presumed that they were waited on by sumptuously shapely air hostesses who looked like Sophia Loren, but who, beneath that glacial exterior of an ice queen, had the sexual appetites of a Serengeti lioness on heat. Grrrrrr.
Airliners, of course, were invariably flown by raffish ex-fighter pilots who could only properly be played on film by actors like Cary Grant or Charlton Heston. Airports were exotic places with potted palms and rooftop viewing stations on which razor-jawed heroes would raise Panama hats towards those tiny waving hands inside the windows of a Lockheed Constellation as it taxied to take-off.
It was always rubbish, of course. There was never a moment in history when there was anything glamorous about air travel. It was always hell. The Constellation was the most beautiful passenger aircraft ever made, but even in its final, most elegant form, the Starliner - weep, weep at such lines - travelling in it over any distance was like being in an industrial gravel-shaker.
Engine vibrations
The Constellation's four Wright Cyclone engines set up vibrations which not merely would rattle your teeth out, but could also set your innards loose, enabling them to wander at large around your torso. It was when a liver emerged from someone's ear and pleaded for rattle-free asylum in another body that the notion of organ transplants was originally born.
In those distant, Constellation days, a transatlantic journey might last 11 hours according to the watch shedding its cogs free on your wrist, but it felt as long as the Dark Ages, complete with all the wars, plagues and famines which brought that period into such grave disrepute.
Bright-toothed teenagers boarding a Starliner emerged at the end of their journey as palsied nonagenarians, saliva dribbling from their de-tusked gums.
Thanks to those clever people in Seattle and Toulouse, air travel today is not quite so bad as it was when airliners were beautiful and journeys took so long that you could contract and die of scurvy between take-off and landing. But they are still hell.
The only thing which makes long flights remotely bearable is alcohol, lots of. Without such anaesthetic for a journey, I would rather donate my still living, fully conscious body to the College of Surgeons with the request: Cut away, my little sawbones - anything is better than an air travel without soothing beakers of booze a-plenty to sustain me.
It was with all the distress of the Pope strolling into a lap-dancing club and finding the Consistory of Cardinals already there, smirking happily, girls akimbo, that I received the news that the British government is thinking about banning alcohol on flights. This is the sort of dangerously subversive thinking that can spread too easily through governing circles. For every instinct in those quarters is to interfere, especially if they have government jets from which they can issue any number of prohibitionist writs over those they rule. I prohibit; therefore I am. Interdico ergo sum.
Problem of air rage
What about the rising problem of drunken air rage? Well, of course control freaks will always cite other people's extremes to justify their own addiction to interference. This doesn't mean the problem of violently drunken passengers doesn't exist - clearly, it does. Just before Christmas a Clare man was fined €300 and given a two-week suspended sentence for such a case. Two years ago, two Americans were briefly - too briefly - imprisoned for violent behaviour during a flight.
But why has the air-travel business failed so lamentably to introduce punishments to fit the peculiar crimes of air travel? It controls access to aircraft; why should it wait for the civic authorities to act? Why couldn't airlines agree, as do other free associations of individuals, on ways of banning undesirables from their midst? If one football association bans a footballer, it can request other associations to apply the ban in their jurisdiction. Nobody has an automatic right to play league football after they have just half beaten to death the other side's goalkeeper; why should in-flight attendants or paying passengers be denied the same protection that footballers enjoy?
It's not even just a question of air-rage. Any moderately experienced traveller will have experienced the phenomenon of the deliberately late passenger - the one who knows that because his luggage has been loaded into the hold, the plane can't take off without him, so there he is, cheerfully sauntering aboard 20 minutes after take-off time, smirking broadly.
Legal redress
Aside from lynching them as they step abroad - an entirely reasonable course of action - why isn't something rather more lawful done about these people? Their credit card details should identify them very clearly. Modern travel by contract is broadly consensual: if the legal consensus is broken, should not the legal redress be broad also? Should airlines not agree both common rules, and also means of enforcing them, with common financial penalties for latecomers?
Equally, once air-ragers have done us all the great favour of identifying themselves, why should they not be banned from all air travel for fixed periods of time, and from taking alcohol ever on a plane?
If there is a sex offenders' list, why shouldn't there be a comparable list for those who might jeopardise an entire aeroplane flight? And since courts ban hooligans from football matches, might they not ban air-ragers from flying? Otherwise, if governments ban alcohol on long-distance flights, a simple tip: forget Ryanair - buy shares in Cunard.