tredwaezy: "But been the only lad of 4 crew and the girls been all up to a size 10 i was glad i was there."
And there's the problem. No one can possibly expect the cabin crew to act as "bouncers" in this type of situation, and I hope it is not considered sexist to suggest that an all-female cabin crew may have had greater difficulty breaking up such an incident.
So what is the solution?
1) Ground staff should not be boarding drunk passengers. Whoever they answer to (the airline or the airport) needs to address this. Make them accountable.
2) When flight crew are suspected of drinking on duty, security personnel have no qualms about calling the police and then we all read about it on the FD forum of this website. So why are airport officials not enforcing the same rules for passengers? Because said customers provide valuable revenue by buying overpriced drinks in the departure terminal.
3) If they do slip through onto the flight, I think that the crew via the authority of the commander should have absolute discretion to kick them off before departure. This policy should be supported by the airline. And to those who say: "but wait! the company needs their custom!" I suggest that rather more passengers (i.e. an entire aircraft) were inconvenicned by this easyJet diversion than the delay incurred before departure had the offenders been offloaded. Does the company really prefer the former?
I recognise that this is all much more difficult when the problems only materialise in the air.
Nick