Originally Posted by autoflight
What remedy?
Captain has set in place the only reasonable remedy for the extreme harm that has been caused to him. This is going to be really serious for the airline. There will be big $ involved A simple negotiated settlement, a public apology and with other confidential terms may not be enough to satisfy him.
Whoa...slow down there. While all that may seem like a possible outcome (of many since all us here don't really have the whole story) in practice civil lawsuits rarely work this way. First of all its going be quite a while before you even get to a point where settlement negotiations might become serious... you discovery, depositions, motions, response to motions, counter motions, continuances, etc, etc. and that's all before you even get to jury trial (if this case is even eligible for that).
Even if Allegiant knows that they are playing for a settlement they will still stall for a few years worth of time while they set aside money to charge off in way to reduce impact on shareholders and reduce taxes. If any of us remember in a year or two you can go check the little fine print in the 10k or other SEC filings since they are required to disclose probable payments from legal actions.
Anyway back the incident itself... I am wondering what the deal is when the captain questioned why he should wait to evac and GC also repeated the call to answer that question and in 45 seconds they received no response. That same person was awfully quick to respond a minute earlier when they heard the captain say evac. I mean information like that is beyond frustrating. I can just imagine that the captain could really be on the fence whether to evac or not but with lack of info it's better to be safe on side so he starts to call it...but then, this unknown person chimes in and can maybe give the crew more info to help them guide their decision... So the captain asks why... he's asking for help (why shouldn't I do this)...and he even wants to know enough to wait quite a while for an answer while temporarily obeying the request. When no answer comes then that whole 60 seconds or more of precious time was completely wasted. After that I can easily imagine the -captain right after that is saying eff it to himself...out of frustration and in his mind immediately goes back to his prior action before the distraction...and now the crew may feel even more rushed now that they just lost another minute to evac... who knows... maybe with more time the evac could have been done more orderly and there would have been no or reduced injuries.
I really hope a follow up is done of this situation as a learning tool for air and ground crews. I mean what if this plane had ultimately burned up... the captain would be a hero there would be a witch hunt being done on unknown RF2...whoever that turns out to be... since the danger of what he did would be much more obvious.