By all means put air ragers to flight, but please leave the toddlers alone

It’s a darts team. Trust me. A transatlantic Virgin flight involving a Mancunian darts team is up there with bubonic plague as a fun experience. The members of the team drink. Oh, how they drink.

She had her gels, liquids and creams in the proper sealed plastic bag. She passed through airport security without a problem. Yet, before the flight took off, she was removed from the plane. Not because she was a terrorist threat. She was evicted because her baby wouldn’t shut up.

The incident, which happened in the United States, involved a 19-month-old child. A youngster at that stage of development where repeating the same phrase ad nauseam becomes the thrill of their day.

As the plane taxied for take-off, the toddler in question started, logically enough, saying “Bye, bye, plane”. Other passengers laughed. The kid figured it was on to something. “Bye, bye, plane,” he said again.

A few dozen times. Or maybe a few hundred times, all at the top of his voice while the flight attendant was doing her safety demonstration.

When she’d finished teaching people how to fasten a seat belt, she leaned across another passenger and suggested, in a fierce undertone to the child’s mother, that this vocalisation had stopped being funny and it was time to get the child to shut up.

How? the mother asked. There was a lot to be said, the flight attendant told her, for children’s Benadryl, the cough medicine that brings drowsiness along as a side effect. The mother crisply told the flight attendant that she wasn’t drugging her toddler just to give the flight attendant a pleasant flight. Other passengers agreed.

Next thing they knew, the plane had turned around and the mother and child were disembarked. Against their will.

The mother’s complaint to Continental, the parent company of the smaller airline involved in the incident, is being processed. An apology and compensation will no doubt follow. Because that’s one flight attendant with a phenomenally short fuse.

Think about it. All she had to do was walk away. She wasn’t stuck in a seat beside the child for the duration of the flight. And anyway, all the kid was doing was talking, unlike the three-year-old who, last week, got turfed off a flight going from Florida to Boston, together with her family. (Their luggage, complete with nappies, flew on without them.)

In that case, the flight, run by AirTran, was already late when young Elly Kuleszas decided to throw a tantrum that rendered her parents powerless to get her into her seat and belted in, not to say belted up. The cabin staff took it for 15 minutes and then evicted the whole clan on the basis that the plane could not legally take off if a passenger of any age was out of their seat.

Two child-eviction incidents within a short period of time may not amount to a trend, but wouldn’t it be interesting if it was? Up to now, the only people who got removed from planes either had bombs in their tennis shoes or were caught engaging in a spot of air rage or sex.

And even they were removed at the end of their flights, not the start. Preemptively removal of annoying under-fives is new.

If generally applied, this approach would have prevented me having a lot of fun a few months back on a flight from Cork when I was seated behind a little boy whose father, before take-off, pointed out that the child could see an airplane if he looked out the window. The child agreed, spotted the plane his father was on about, and realised with glee that there were loads more, as well as the one to which his father had drawn his attention.

“A udder nun!” the child would announce. “A UDDER nun!”

Of course, if the Benadryl-touting stewardess had been on board, she’d probably have tried to drug this little article into subjection and silence, although “A udder nun” is slightly more interesting to the innocent bystanders than “Bye, bye plane”.

Even when they’re a bit fractious, the worst option on a long flight is not a toddler. It’s a darts team. Trust me. A transatlantic Virgin flight involving a Mancunian darts team is up there with bubonic plague as a fun experience. The members of the team drink. Oh, how they drink. When the trolley passes, they always ask for the full can (of beer, what else?) When they’ve imbibed it, they prove their manhood by crushing the can in their bare hands. Then they throw the crushed cans at each other, except when they’re touring the jumbo chatting up any good-looking girl who’ll tolerate it. Or singing in concert. You might think that with all the beer, they would go to sleep, and they do. But not together. They sleep in a rota, with a team left on the alert to maintain a critical mass of singing/can-crushing/touring. The worst thing is that they think they’re the funniest thing since Bernard Manning, and Lord rest him, let’s not go there.

Next to them in awfulness is a species which has, mercifully, died off since smoking on planes was banned. They weren’t necessarily smokers themselves. They were ashtray-clickers. Fidgeters who, when not using both hands to eat with, would open and shut the ashtray again and again and again, often in time to the music they were listening to, until everybody around them wanted to do amateur spontaneous limb-amputation on them.

Armrest-hoggers are bad, too. They’re the ones who assume the shared armrest belongs to them. Not that armrests in planes are worth having at the best of times. What mean person designs those things without any padding? My elbows need to go into intensive care after any longish flight.

Possibly the worst, though, are the promiscuous sleepers. Self-contained sleepers who stay on their own side are no problem, even if they snore. The problem sleepers are the ones who fall asleep in an upright position and then droop sideways until they encounter your shoulder, at which point they snuggle confidingly into you, nestling their forehead into your neck.

If you shake them loose, they wake up in terror and look at you as if you had suggested a quick wing-walk, but if you leave them asleep on you, it feels like collusion and there’s always the possibility they’ll drool.

Next to them is the group you find where instead of having a row of seats in front of them there’s a carpet-covered wall. Something about that carpeted wall calls out to the naked-feet paraders.

They kick off their shoes, struggle off their socks and plant their spogs in a smelly sprawl high over their heads, naked against the carpeted wall. Their feet usually have toenails as long as Howard Hughes’s and they have no shame about it.

But will they get put off a plane for inflicting their naked extremities on the rest of the passengers? No.

I’d have thought cabin staff who ache to evict passengers should start with terrorists, air-ragers, aerial bonkers and feet flashers, and leave talkative toddlers alone.