eyeinthesky
BALIX: If he calls the emergency on the Ocean (whether he uses the PAN words or not), but then flies on for another 90+ mins, past perfectly good facilities at Prestwick, Manchester, (Shannon?) and others, then in my books it's not an emergency!!I
Which is pretty much the point I was trying to make. Perhaps the Virgin declaring a 'Pan' was more correct than the Speedbird declaring a 'medical emergency' but when it gets down to it, we are not going to deny a reasonable request for an expiditious routing over semantics. Of course, we must assume that the pilot is not telling porkies in order to get to the bar a few minutes earlier
A couple of months ago I had a similar situation with a Speedbird coming off the ocean. However, the pilot decided not to declare anything as, in his words, the patient was now sitting up and having breakfast. Good for him, it must have been tempting to follow his company's advice (he had been speaking to them on his other box) and declare a medical emergency just to jump the queue at BNN.