Originally Posted by
dtaylor1984
Wouldn't there need to be procedures to disembark passengers in the event of, say, a mechanical failure away from the gate?
Sure, but what you might do when you find yourself with a broken airplane away from the ramp is one thing, what you choose to do operationally, when you still have other options, is another. I don't fly passengers (thankfully), but I would expect that if the airplane is capable of being towed, that it would be towed into the gate. Certainly there could be failures which prevent the plane from moving at all, but a broken airplane on a taxiway, while not exactly an emergency, is certainly an abnormal situation beyond the airline's control. I don't know, but I would suspect that such an event would involve the passengers sitting on the airplane for a long time before a plan was made and put into action for disembarking them. On the other hand, if you just discovered that there's no towbar at the destination, the choice at that point to press on and then use whatever disembarking method you'd use if the wheels fell off the plane would be second best next to simply returning and putting the passengers on a plane that the station is equipped to handle normally. I'm not sure I'm explaining this thought well, but the FAA would be a lot more inclined to view benevolently an airline's use of a non-standard, non-approved method of disembarking passengers when there was no other choice due to circumstances beyond their control, than they would view the *choice* to use that same method, when there were other options, the situation was entirely due to the airline's error (forgetting to check the the station had the correct towbar) and the choice was made purely on economic grounds.