Bantam Press £12.99 pp360

For nearly everyone, nearly all the time, flying on commercial aircraft is brain-numbingly, arse-achingly dull. After a prolonged period in the chainstore limbo of departures, you board, eat bad food, watch bad films, sleep badly in an inhumanly small space, and — if you can summon up the energy — pray for it all to be over.

So the sort of flight that Imogen Edwards-Jones describes in Air Babylon initially sounds like a nice change. It’s all go. The pilot’s hungover, the flight attendants are drunk, the passengers are coked up, there’s a corpse in the galley, a couple is having sex in one lavatory and a junkie has OD’d in the other. Buzzing vibrators in luggage cause bomb alerts; dogs freeze solid in the hold; colostomy bags burst in economy and children spray vomit from row A to row K.

Supposedly, this has all really happened — sort of. For her latest book, Edwards-Jones has used the same technique she employed in her last exposé, Hotel Babylon. Off the record, she has interviewed a range of airline employees, then taken every juicy anecdote and packed it into a fictionalised 24 hours — this time narrated by an unnamed ground manager, the Anonymous of the book’s byline. On the plus side, this allows her to present some funny and sometimes alarming tales in a context that won’t identify her informants. But it also gives her an excuse to pad out the good stuff with tedious acres of cack-handed characterisation, excruciating dialogue (cabin crew may not be models of erudition, but do any of them really say “That couldn’t be further from the truth” or “Is the Pope Catholic”?), and a plot that, appropriately, never gets off the ground. By the end of it, she has transformed 50 pages of good yarns into 360 pages of bad fiction.

And even the yarns get a bit samey after a while. As the sexual scenarios bang on, the corpses pile up and bodily fluids spurt in all directions, anyone reading this relatively short book will start to feel like one of those long-haul passengers: exhausted, and desperate for some fresh air. Unfortunately, you're sitting next to Anonymous and he simply won’t shut up.

True, he’s got some interesting nuggets. The detail of daily airport life is fun. (The airport is supposedly fictional, but the disguise is laughably thin: on the London tube network, four terminals . . . now where could that be?) There’s something satisfying about knowing that the vehicle employed to empty the aircraft lavatories is called the honey wagon. On board, any stroppy first and club class passengers won’t be delighted to know where their steak might have been, and economy meals are usually too sloppy to hold, so offenders will simply have their stew spiked with Dulcolax. The advice on scams is handy, too. Look out for those duty-free designer watches: it’s all too tempting for flight attendants to replace the genuine article with unspottable £5 fakes from Thailand and pocket the difference. And any regular traveller will be interested to hear how check-in staff, exchanging e-mails with the boarding gate, casually conspire to smooth your way or ruin your flight, according to their whim.

But the more contentious it gets, the vaguer and less traceable are the allegations. Is Edwards-Jones sure that pilots regularly take off knowing their landing lights are faulty? Where are these UK aircraft that haven’t been serviced for more than a year? The answer is, she doesn’t know — but somebody told her it was true, so she put it in her book. You can’t help suspecting that a lot of it is exaggerated, apocryphal or simply made up — if not by the author, at least by her disgruntled informants.

Her way with facts that are easily checkable doesn’t inspire faith. Ryanair’s notoriously fast turnaround time isn’t the 40 minutes she quotes, but a far more impressive 25 — something a quick call to the airline would have established. And in a book that culminates in a flight to Dubai, there is really no excuse for not knowing your sheikhs from your Sikhs.

Ah, the flight to Dubai. After an extended meander around Heathrow — like a novelisation of the BBC’s Airport series, but a little more candid — the second half of the book is an unrestrained airborne orgy of sex, drugs, death and barely controlled bowel movements. It sounds rather fun, but in her eagerness to pack in every mile-high-club knee-trembler she has heard about it becomes as wearying as being trapped for 14 hours next to Airport’s Jeremy Spake.

If only she had gone for the short-haul approach. The material here could have made a good £3.95 checkout-cheapie booklet, in the “50 hilarious airline anecdotes” vein. There are two valuable lessons to be drawn from this book. First: “fictionalising” can all too easily be an excuse for sloppiness and self-indulgence. Second: if you must have an argument with the cabin crew, don’t eat anything afterwards.

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