Alibaba,
Originally Posted by
alibaba
The question about what a passenger’s life is worth. Well I think safety and the safety of its passengers is the first and most important item with ANY RESPONSIBLE OPERATOR. Referring to whether putting Defib's on an a/c is the same as caviar or pretzels is shocking! If you think LOCO's look at safety in that way, then you show your naivety and lack of industry wide appreciation for safety management. Safety is NOT the remit of full service carriers only. The quicker people understand that the better. Do you think EZY or Air Berlin and the rest of the low cost market work in such a manor?
Please let me clarify the defib versus pretzels or caviar thing. What I was trying to put across is that these warrant two completely different decision making channels, hence my words "we are talking equipment here". Caviar, pretzels or no nibblies at all is something that can be looked at to save on costs - a defib unit we agree is aircraft equipment category but that does not automatically make it a must-carry-item. We mean the same though: ANY RESPONSIBLE OPERATOR as you said
Ultimately every operator out there will have at some point had the defib/no defib decision on the table. If at some point in the past the decision may have come up as no, then the issue should come up for review at some or multiple point/s in the future. Be that for reasons of regularly reviewing your product/safety, the cost of defibs coming down, the spread of defibs becoming wider ... or an emergency on board your aircraft or that of a competitor providing hard grounds for review.
IMHO defib units do serve to treat a very specific emergency condition (if broken down into percentages), albeit a very severe and not uncommon one. These units will continue to penetrate the market but as of today I would NEVER have any misgivings against any airline that do not carry these yet. Clearly though it is always only a matter of time until a defib on board will be needed to TRY and save a patient ... or a pax doctor fails in reviving a patient without a defib available and later becomes vocal about it.
As to your mention of EZY or Air Berlin and the manor they work in ... if that was directed at me then let me just point out that I specifically tried to keep my post neutral. No RYR bashing, nor any other carrier or type. Why? ... because frankly I do not have the picture of how every carrier operates/thinks. I fully agree with you that these issues we are talking about here apply industry wide and regardless of operator type.
For sure there are LCC's that carry the "full works" and there are full service carriers that do not. And that exactly is the point of the whole thing ... how much medical equipment you carry and how extensively you train (or how safely you operate your aircraft for that matter) should NOT be an issue of how cheaply or not you sell your seats.
There are black sheep out there and to deny that would be naive ... often such less visible differences only come to light after incidents become public.