V-Flyer

Hello,

Wondered if anyone knew what happened to Miss Behavin on Sat. It diverted to Goose bay on its way to SFO? It resumed to SFO after a few hours.....

It arrived back yesterday lunchtime and hasn't flown since!!!

I was on that flight; it was a medical emergency - I saw the poor soul in question being taken off the plane by paramedics, so this wasn't an explanation covering for a mechanical fault. I hope they get better and also manage to find a way out of Goose Bay once recovered - it won't be easy (or cheap, I presume).

We were actually only in Goose Bay for about an hour, mostly taking on fuel - the rest of the 4 hour delay was just time lost dumping fuel, landing & taking off. The captain had to try several fuel cards, none of which were accepted by the airport, but eventually they agreed to bill SRB direct for payment!

Luckily we had a spare pilot on board - presumably dead-heading? - so were able to continue to SFO rather than overnight in the military barracks.

Still rather confused about why not divert to Halifax, which is only a little further on and has better medical facilities and presumably more used to these things. I'm not going to go into details about the passenger, but I doubt 30mins or so extra flying would have mattered too much. Is Goose Bay a standard emergency stop for Virgin?

drew

Thank you Drew. I was wondering if it was a medical emergency. He/she may have a few difficulties being repatriated out of Goose Bay, let's hope they make a full recovery.

It's good to get a report like this from someone who was actually on the plane.

Maybe Halifax was closed for some reason - normallu it would make sense as more used to handling that number of pax if they needed to be offloaded etc

Hope the ill pax makes a speedy recovery (and is insured otehrwise it will be expensive!)

Out of interest, what generally happens in cases like this regarding the extra costs incurred by Virgin?

I imagine they must be quite substantial (e.g. extra fuel, airport fees, rescheduled connecting flights, potentially putting up 300-odd people in hotels); do they swallow them as a cost of business, or do they try and charge the passenger/ the passenger's insurance?

Drew

I think it's a cost of doing business. It's a different matter if the flight is diverted due to a pax causing disruption through drink etc.

I was told that Virgin had insurance to cover the cost of the pax being stranded by the ash cloud which was why they were able to issue their directives about what the pax should do.

Korean Air only advised their pax about how, if and when they could rebook their flights until about a week after everything was flying again!

Ed

I think it depends on a number of things. If the pax has a pre- existing medical condition and travelling against medical advise the pax is liable for the extra costs. If they have no medical history relating to the condition that caused the divert then the airline are liable. A very costly problem for the airline, but it would make sense if they had insurance for this kind of thing.

Insurance is there to cover a risk of something happening. The more likely X will happen the higher the premium.

The premium would depend on the probability of this sort of incident happening, how often it happens and the associated costs - extra fuel, landing charges, possible hotels, rebooking missed connections etc.

For some things the costs of the premium may outweigh the costs of the actual incident.

A business will weigh all of this up before making a decision as to taking out insurance (or not).