@ AlexW1, hello, I am a pilot from KLM, and I fly on the Europe Fleet, so I am familiar with Aberdeen and SAS Ground services there.
I am sorry to hear about your unfortunate experience.
Was your flight on a Boeing 737 or a Fokker 100? Or alternatively, do you have the date and flight number to PM to me and I will find out the aircraft type.
The reason I need to know this, is so I can contact the relevant fleet operations office to find out any more background info on the incident.
I will leave the discussion on MOR, CAP, EASA etc to the experts
, but if you only have time to read 2 posts, I suggest you only concentrate on the 2 by mad_jock. He recognises the operational factors that we often encounter at ABZ.
Only those directly involved know the reason for the potential overweight situation, but it could be anything from technical reasons such as runway change, aircraft deficiency, excess fuel uplift, etc, or simple human error such as a breakdown in communication between the SAS operations office and their check in staff, or a mis-reading of the so called Regulated Take Off Weight that the crew would have calculated. The potential reasons are numerous, but the end result is the same....the aircraft weight needs to be reduced to within whatever the pre-defined limits were, and that is what affected you.
It is company procedure in KLM, to file a "Trip Report", with an allocated delay code, back in Amsterdam, to report occurences such as this. As crew, we report unusual occurences that cause us to deviate from schedule (particularly as there were transiting pax with missed connections on board. The crew would not have been at all happy with the situation, and would have generated a trip report in order to force an investigation of why the situation arose in the first place. (Every single trip report is investigated, and a personal reply sent to the Captain and Crew). From the aircraft type and flight number that you send me, I will be able to pass on your complaint to the office that would have received and investigated the trip report.
The reason for you not having received a speedy reply is that the investigation is very often bogged down in bureaucracy, red tape and liaison with other departments and third parties. I have personally had experience of up to 3 months waiting for a reply to a trip report, but the Company is making a concerted effort to speed things up. As an example, in your case, the customer service dept would need to contact about 3 or 4 other internal depts within KLM to get to the ABZ handling agents who would ultimately have to provide the explanation. The written explanation from SAS would then pass back up the chain before you would get an official response from KLM. Concurrently with all this, the fleet flight operations dept would be carrying out their own 'trip report' based investigation.
There is a very clear and defined split between crew responsibilities and ground handling reponsibilities at KLM. All passenger handling matters are the direct responsibility of the ground handling agent until the aircraft doors are closed. So whatever the reason for needing to offload 15 pax, the crew would have no say in who was to be offloaded. The handling agent offloads the required number of pax in accordance with a priority that has been previously specified by KLM. The use of discretion is not forbidden, and arguably, could have been applied in your case.
My own personal suggestion to you, is that you may receive a quicker response by contacting SAS Ground Handling directly in writting, and copying the letter to KLM (Once you give me the flight details I will email you a contact name and address to send the letter to). I will also try and find out the factual reason for the situation occuring in the first place and let you know.