BarbiesBoyFriend;
Would they have insurance for that?
The question is unanswerable except by the outcomes and that will last years if not decades - yes, they will have insurance for contingencies but "who pays" will be a very long and expensive battle.
The involved (prosecutorial or defendant) parties will be:
- the airline and all managerial staff related to this accident as well as all all those involved in Spanair's and SAS's MD83 operations;
- the airline's directors and almost certainly SAS and their shareholders;
- individual passengers and families and their lawyers,
- lawyers representing class action lawsuits;
- manufacturer of the aircraft and all sub-contracted manufacturers;
- the operating crew and crew representatives;
- maintenance personal and representatives;
- all training staff as well as training syllabi and programs;
- the airport authority and possibly ATC;
- the fire and rescue people and representatives;
- the Spanish regulatory authority, (for certification and regulatory matters);
- every document within all these separate organizations will be audited and examined closely for correctness and guidance, beginning with the immediate documents, (Aircraft AOM/FCOM - SOPs, MEL, Master MEL) and a full, detailed examination of the safety and operating culture of the airline and the owner's airline, SAS.
For those unfortunate enough to be close to any such tragedy, they will know that twenty years is not an unreasonable time to see
final resolutions and settlements, although main battles will have been completed earlier. Suicides occur (as did within maintenance personnel in the Alaska 261 accident off Los Angeles), lives and families are destroyed, corporations may cease to exist.
A bleak, but frank picture of what is to come. The message is abundantly clear to airline owners (shareholders) and management alike, (or ought to be if both accountable groups know and understand the business they're in - some don't, or at least behave as though they don't know.
The dynamics of safety work are subtle and therefore not easily perceived. So much of human behaviour is "normal" and the desire for "normal" very strong.
Denial of "inconvenient" data or information is possible even in high-risk endeavours either because "nothing happens" despite such data being presented (or the organization even being warned of high-risk), or the "
normalization of deviance", twin subtleties that few in operations either comprehend or appreciate even given the introduction (here in Canada) of SMS "training"...(1-day wonder-courses). Denial - rather the "
passive invisibility of risk", is more prevalent than we would expect. The enticement to normalize deviance because "nothing happens" for years, is very strong especially when the high pressure to reduce costs are involved and also especially because "risk" is not a "thing" which can be "photographed", enumerated or quantified in the same way say, fuel costs, can be.
Few managers understand safety principles but they know the costs very well and hear about them all the time from those senior within the organization and, if only to reduce/deflect "flack" from above, adhere to or carry out the message to those lower down).
I've mentioned many times, two very good books on these very important but not-easily grasped subjects - Diane Vaughan's "
The Challenger Launch Decision", and Starbuck's and Farjoun's, "
Organization at the Limit". "
Fine-tuning the Odds Until Something Breaks" by Starbuck and Milliken is an introduction to this kind of perception, so greatly required yet almost completely missing in airline managment's understanding of the business.