Sorry, JO - got ahead of myself earlier - you do think I was unfair. Please accept my apologies for rushing to judge you incorrectly from your earlier words.
There is the given regulatory environment on the day for any particular operation, and there is of course the breadth of the legal requirement placed upon the captain in safeguarding the flight - not a simple tickbox exercise, that one, is it? There are recommendations and there is company practice and individual judgement, tolerance or compliance. There is always risk to be minimised, proactively managed or alternatively the responsibility is variously ignored, abdicated, otherwise mismanaged, gambled with or exacerbated.
And then when doors are finally closed there is only our captain who decides if it is a go or no go, based on whatever info of which he/she has availed himself/herself and whether it is deemed reliable, and yes, gut feeling wins the day.
On the proverbial bag loaded / passenger missing front I have a good idea what used to happen when some unfortunate like me advised a captain with doors closed and engines now running that it seemed a bag had been loaded but its requisite SLF item had not. Few captains would be particularly impressed I imagine, not least because their hand would be forced. For a captain on the ground there is only one thing to do about knowledge of a risk like that, isn't there? Or do daily wobblers like that get ducked now by keeping the actual monitoring to a minimum (ignorance is bliss / incident statistics will serve as a safe refuge if ever a storm befalls the operation)?
If simply satisfying the regulatory regime is seen as sufficient by any passenger airline then how can that airline claim that safety is their first priority ? They can't, can they? Safety regulation or even compliance with it isn't safety - it is at best regulation compliance. I know of no passenger airline that claims
regulation compliance as its first priority. All airlines claim
safety as their first priority. No airline and no captain can abdicate the one however and then claim that the other was fairly and logically expected to do the trick every time.
Since those very obvious and frequent head count reconciliation delays quietly disappeared (I used to overhear oh so many discussions involving so many musical intruments plus pax plus infants versus what was presented on the form involving ground team leaders/numbers 1-4 and the captain that I lost count!)
But I have witnessed no alternative to headcounts as a means of passenger verification. So are there any? I suspect not really as the head count may have disappeared round about the same time as that unoccupied reserved emergency row solution got hammered into shape over a period of some weeks before a final standard was settled upon. Wasn't that the same review that meant seats 2DEF could now contain one child I think, that anyone over 16 not over 18 could sit in an emergency row and that a blind eye might be turned to those slightly immobile types one often finds using emergency rows but who looked too business-like or too upper-klasse to question
I agree in my limited experience that other airlines do not lately seem to rely on a headcount either, but again, what are the rigorous alternatives being practised daily? I can tell you that my Lexmark inkjet does not impregnate my self-printed boarding pass with any proximity chip that might have been read by a sensor above the cabin door
Maybe my mobile phone is how they do it - those redundant inflight mobile systems have a use afterall?
Pray someone, do tell us - what really are the alternatives to head counts with very busy airline operations like Ryanair who in the main use small airports with irregular security / passenger handling or big ones with local lo-negotiated modified or self-managed or third party outsourced arrangements? With any MO not shy of frequent heated conversations provoked between passengers and gate staff enforcing on the spot fines, I conclude that feature alone provides countless opportunities for irregularities. Distracting staff from noticing that a passenger has not arrived at the designated aircraft despite handing over a boarding slip for that flight, might be a doddle sometimes.
Parts of the operation at the 180 or so different airports that our Michael referred to whilst in Sweden might also be at risk of daily opportunities for mixing passengers between different flights. Long largely unsupervised walks past adjacent stands or past immediately adjacent easy routes back into the terminal as already possibly exists at Zadar which is just one off the top of my head? Carcassonne might be another interesting case study.
As an aside - one which highlights how local risk versus standard regulatory compliance may not be a neutral equation, I picked up an old spent 7.62mm cartridge case on the side of the road whilst in that newest EU country and also read that Croatia will not be declared clear of known minefields for another 6 years at least.
So do we think passenger head counts would be more or less useful in countries where sundry surplus weapons and explosives still abound or will those certificated airline minimum compliance standards complete the safety-first trick anywhere?