Unfortunately Pit S.O.S is not crew and seems not to have a clue about the legal responsibility's of a crew.
Or for that matter that Captains are not employed to be nice cuddly huggie feely types.
The legislation is set in law in most countries its defined in the air navigation order which is an act of parliament so as such breaches of it are in the high court domain and carry a sentence up to 7 years in prison in the UK.
This act apply's equally to the crew as it does to the pax, ie if we are deficient in our application of the act we get the same scale of punishment that the pax do.
The buck stops at the Captain inside an aircraft, it doesn't matter what marketing and commercial have dreamed up they have to keep the flight legal.
On the subject of informing pax, its not as easy as it seems, the company legal types don't want you to get into a discussion if you are using your rights given under the act of parliament. All that leads to is potential for a long drawn out court case arguing the toss. So its " I am giving you a legal instruction so if you don't comply your getting off". Even if you want to expand they instruct you not to.
It doesn't happen very often but when it does it isn't pleasant for the crew and there is heaps of paper work.
And Pit they don't, basically once the kids is un-min grade they can be seated where ever. Most CC will move others to get it through for an age 9 female.
The operational crew are not the ones to complain to though.
It needs to go directly to customer services complaints. We (crew) can report issues as many times as we like but until there is an overwhelming issues coming into commercial from all sides they will ignore it. We saw how long it took for a certain loco to change to allocated seating.
The selling of emergency exit leg room though is particularly annoying to me, it is by far (90%) the cause of most conflicts to do with seat allocation. It is also the one most fraught with legal discussions as it is a matter of opinion if the person at the door can operate it. Having to lumber the thing out 30-40 times a year doing pilot safety equipment training I know for a fact that if a frail auld un lifts the handle they will just end up on the floor with a 25kg door on top of them. But they are the ones who are most likely to pay the extra cash for the leg room. The suggestion to remove a row to have completely free from legislation extra leg room is always refused for economic reasons.
The only way to stop the practise would be a legislation change to ban the practise of pre allocating emergency exit rows. But as there prime efforts at the moment in EASA seem to be pushing through legislation to force airlines to allow two pieces of hand baggage completely ignoring the safety aspects of where to put the baggage in the cabin I will not hold my breath.
Anyway I will leave this forum in peace now due to S.O.S, not many operational crew can be bother with this forum and it can continue without my input so that's one less person that has a clue giving input to the SLF.
Pax don't pay my wages, the company does, the company also has a clauses in my contract that I have to do certain things which I do. The loosing of certain awkward customers to other carriers isn't really an issue as 99.99% of pax get on and get off again without a problem. To be honest by the time you take into account the time and effort spent dealing with the complaints from the 0.01%, there is no profit in transporting them anyway.
No doudt I will have another week away only being able to read pprune due to me being a Captain and speaking like one and not some huggy puffy HR type.
Last edited by mad_jock; 16th Jul 2014 at 12:20.