Incidents of crime and disorder are up at Scottish airports. It's a sign of what's wrong with us, says Mark Smith

Who doesn’t have a drunken airport story? Mine was last summer: Jet2 to Tenerife (asking for trouble). The group sat next to me made it known how the flight would go by slamming down the seat trays after take-off and lining up the miniatures, lots and lots of miniatures. In the four and a half hours that followed, they had a very good time (me less so). What is it about airports and aeroplanes that acts like a trigger for some people? Off the ground, off our faces.

I’m going to have a stab at answering that question but before I do, let me give you the context. New figures obtained by The Daily Record show that the police attended 3,167 incidents of crime and disorder at Edinburgh airport last year, 1,526 at Glasgow and 687 at Aberdeen, which is an increase of about 40% in two years. In some ways, the figures aren’t new – airport disorder has been on a steep upward curve since at least 2015 – but the latest rise is another sign that we aren’t getting on top of whatever it is that’s happening. I’ll tell you what’s happening: planes fuelled by kerosene, passengers fuelled by alcohol.

I don’t want to exaggerate obviously (far be it for me, a newspaper columnist, to exaggerate): I know that tens of millions of people travel through Scotland’s airports every year and only a few thousand end up in trouble, and not all the incidents are linked to alcohol. But the problem is that the people who do get off their faces usually have a disproportionate effect on other people because everyone’s stuck in a tube in the sky. There is no escape.

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