I don't believe there is any legislation to prevent airlines cancelling flights due to poor loads. Happens often in the regions, particularly over Xmas where in some ports demand is very weak so a flight is cancelled and the pax transferred onto the next service.
Yes as I said before it is something to do with the fact that the Airlinees are NOT ''common carriers'' (I think that is the correct wording).
They do it regularly (or certainly used to) for that reason and also of course other reasons like a Crew member going sick, or a mechanical fault, but also just for poor pax loads.
The pax basically have no real comeback as long as they get where they paid to go eventually.
I have even seen it many times where they will even divert a pax flight to suit themsleves, I recall one incident years ago when we had a DC9 go U/S in ROK and I had to go up to it, no other flights going to ROK that day, so they just put me on a direct BNE-TSV DC9 flight and diverted it into ROK, they just told the pax after takeoff from BNE that they were diverting via ROK for ''operational requirements".
