I wouldn't be surprised if this story was hatched in a traffic jam on the M11 on Thursday night/Friday morning.
Picture the scene: poor old hack hails cabs from STN to go home to somewhere like Cambridge. Heavy snowfall blocks road and cab is caught in a mega 20 mile jam. After 14 hours of hearing the cabbie wittering on about famous stars he has had in the back of his cab the hack notices the meter has gone past £250.
"Oy", says the journo to the cabbie, "Have you got any good stories I can write about to make a few bob to offset the cost"?
"Well", says the cabbie, "I once took some pilots home after a party on their week off and they had had more than two shandies."
"Great, shock, horror" says the hack, his creative mind whirring. And the rest is....the basis for the nonsense we are reading today.
Surely if a normally accurate paper like the Telegraph had plenty of good evidence from the cabbie such as dates and times, names of aircrew, offices they were dropped at etc, they would have the basis for a sensible investigation and that wrongdoers would be rightfully exposed.
But it would appear that the cabbie has not even bothered to report his claims to the authorities at STN...I've certainly not heard of 'loads of pilots' being sacked for boozing.
Nice comments from Capt PPRuNe, but what exactly is a news depratment? Shome mishtake shurely?