IT MAY come as a bit of a shock to learn that alcohol is the cause of only a quarter of air rage incidents.

This is surprising considering the amount of money some budget airlines charge for the stuff, but the antics of Andrew Wiseman are less common than we think.

Having said that, alcohol’s curse is that it wipes out reason and common sense and can transform normally sane and reasonable people into boorish idiots.

Wiseman is lucky to be walking the streets after the behaviour which disrupted a flight last May, walking out of the court with a nine-month prison sentence suspended for two years.

Recorder Edward Burgess is aware that some people “may regard this as a soft sentence.”

Some people?

Pretty much everyone I would imagine, especially those 175 passengers and five crew who had to put up with 40 very unpleasant and sometimes frightening minutes as Mr Wiseman rowed with his partner, head-butted a teenager, grabbed an off-duty policeman by the throat and kicked the interior walls of the cabin.

Well-oiled, violent and threatening, he’d terrorised a female flight attendant and caused more than £200-worth of damage to a custody van on the way to the police station when the plane finally landed.

Wiseman is, of course, ashamed and embarrassed by the incident, but isn’t that a reaction we hear so many times when alcohol is blamed for the unacceptable behaviour of the idiot minority?

Tougher rules and stricter checks on passengers and harsher sentences on those that, in Wiseman’s words ‘kick off’, are the only things to address the problem.