Why can't we have child free flights?

I see Ryanair are in trouble again. After removing a Jamaican band from one of their planes as suspected terrorists - and then refusing to let them back on when it emerged they were entirely innocent – they have reportedly thrown an Italian doctor off a flight from Alghero to London for talking.

According to the good doctor, "I was talking normally, and a steward asked me to be quiet, in a brusque manner," he said.

"After five minutes, when the announcements came to an end, another stewardess came up and said that I had been warned and I should have shut up. She asked if I wanted to get off the plane.”

Now whilst the interminably verbose are undoubtedly in the top ten of life’s irritants there are usually far worse offenders in the cattle class conditions of most budget flights. Namely children.

I recall a recent flight from Italy where a child next to me managed to turn himself upside down attempting to get at the lifejacket beneath his seat. While across the isle one selfless parent, who couldn’t be arsed to keep their child quietly entertained, simply plopped a disc into his DVD player and blasted the surrounding rows into submission with the latest offering from Disney. And yet despite this Animal House-style mayhem the airline staff did nothing.

The late comedian Bill Hicks used to tell a joke about kids on flights.

“I was on this one flight right, I'm flying, I'm sleeping on the plane, I'm "knackered". Very tired right and I feel this tapping on my head. And I look up and there's this little kid - loose! on the fucking plane, he's just loose. It's his playground in the sky. And he has decided that his job is to repetitively tap me on the top of the head.”

“I look across the aisle at his mom. She's just smiling, you know.
Guy next to the mom goes, ‘They're so cute when they're that small.’

“Isn't that amazing, letting your kid run loose on a plane. And then the kid runs over to the emergency exit and he starts flipping that handle to the door. And the guy next to the mom starts to get up, and I go, ‘Wait a minute... we're about to learn an important lesson right here.’

“Kwoooshh.

“Why you're right, the smaller he gets, the cuter he is.”

All of which leads neatly on to my big idea. We have men free hotels and men free beaches, so why doesn’t some bright spark with a stately home sized amount of cash start a child free airline.

No doubt there'll be some who think such a thing is ‘symptomatic of how selfish modern society has become’, but all I'm asking for is choice.

I put up with the badly behaved little buggers scratching my car, playing football against my house and letting rip with a volley of expletives when I have the temerity to ask them if they’d mind playing outside their own front door. Hell, I'd pay double to avoid that tap-tap-tapping on the back of my head.