It is the surgeon’s job to wield the scalpel and the pilot’s job to fly the airplane. That's where it stops. The customer is master of his own destiny; it is not the pilot’s role to decide what is best for the customer. It is up to the surgeon/pilot to present the options and likely results to the customer and for the customer to decide which option to take. The customer does not hand over all decision making to the pilot when he walks onto the airplane. If the customer makes a bad decision then so be it.
As for how the customers' decisions are passed to the pilots? That's for the courts to decide, naturally with the input of the experts in the field. Perhaps the presumption is that in non-standard situations the plane lands as soon as reasonably possible, sort of how the FARS suggests one should proceed if you have an engine failure on a US registered 747. It sounds from the witness on the plane that the pax did not want to continue, this was known by cabin crew, and this should have been communicated to flight deck.
I am not interested in the minutiae of how a 747 pilot plans his fuel burn. All I said was that if a student pilot has to land short of destination with a MAYDAY questions will be asked. It is incredibly arrogant to expect this should not apply to 747 pilots. Looks like the FAA are getting interested, they obviously have questions about how flights are managed in their airspace, quite right too.
To say an airline is safe because it hasn't had an accident in 20 years shows extraordinary complacency.
So MAN was the planned destination all along? Perhaps you should put that in the R&N thread so the experts can discuss. From a PAX point of view, if I have to change planes anyway, I'd rather stop at an enroute airport which didn't require a three engined winter atlantic crossing. I'd also rather stop at an airport where they didn't have to make sure the runway was sterile because of fuel concerns.
Feel free to rubbish me
Cheers