Originally Posted by
Less Hair
How could they take off with too many passengers? They should have disembarked them for flight safety reasons.
Honestly what is the fuss here---if you have read the thread there was a 757 config disagreement and they were 3 seats short on final boarding - yes a balls up that should have been picked up sooner and pax greeted on arrival at BHX with a nice compo offer
in this case the skipper offered them 2 jump seats and a spare seat which the pax were OK to accept to get home PDQ
The skipper made the call (quite rightly so) to get the (revenue) pax home (they were not staff pax) by putting 2 of them on the spare rear jump seats - all perfectly fine if the CC and the pax were happy with that - I am sure as they wanted to go home PDQ and not to have to go to a hotel and wait for the next seats available -
Thomson
should then have ensured that suitable compo was offered and made clear to the pax
prior to disembarking and this Press debacle would not have occurred.
The CC during the meal service (I am sure any TOM CC would be well used to staff pax on jump seats) should not have made or allowed the pax sit on the floor but moved them to other jump seats forward or mid cabin (757 has plenty of jump seats) as to not interrupt the cabin service at the rear galley - all jump seats have belts and masks - pax safe and ok.
We often had an overbooking situation and put pax on the jump seats - either the spare ones in the cabin or the flight deck (you could back then) and offer suitable refund - many refused as they loved going on the flight deck - different times then
cannot understand the fuss made here at all - we take staff pax on jump seats everyday - OK so putting revenue pax on them is rare but in this case the skipper offered the pax the choice to get home or be stuck at wherever it was?
What should have been done is that a refund agreed ASAP for the pax so they were happy
(in theory they could claim denied boarding equivalent and expenses for meals/hotac ) and the CC should not have surprisingly allowed them to sit on the floor! no need for that at all