Can Passengers Disembark Early?
 

Would appreciate the law, or company rules, behind this situation.

Passenger with no checked luggage is on a demestic flight AAA-BBB connecting to BBB-CCC. AAA-BBB flight is diverted to CCC due to weather and remains on the ground for 90 minutes, but not at a gate (aircraft is an EMB-170).

Passsenger is not permitted to leave the aircraft which makes sense if the aircraft is not at a gate. However, if the aircraft had proceeded to a gate could the passenger have been permitted to leave? And if so, could there have been any rules which would not permit reaching a gate?

Thanks!

Pharaoh,

On a divert, usually it's been my experience that operations/dispatch would rather not have the passengers deplane unless there is going to be an excessive wait. This is because they often scatter to the winds, and then there's the strong potential to be delayed even further.

I've had two experiences with your question. The first one was where we remote parked (near an FBO) and a passenger asked to deplane since the divert field was closer to their final destination. We tried to coordinate it with dispatch, but the powers on high denied the passengers request since we were on an unsecured ramp and locating the passengers checked bags was not possible.

However if we had been able to go to the gate, and the person didn't have checked luggage, I would have been hard pressed to find any person onboard that wanted to leave the flight (permanently), if that is what they wanted. However it would be worth prefacing the statement that doing so may have repercussions on any other tickets attached to that reservation. (Say for instance the flight was Washington to Chicago and diverted into Indianapolis, and the passenger wanted to rent a car to drive to Chicago to catch a connecting flight. The connecting flight reservation might have issues.)

On a domestic flight the passenger could get off the flight as long as they could do so safely. I was enroute from Baltimore to Houston not too long ago and diverted to New Orleans for weather. Two passengers happened to have New Orleans as their final destination but were scheduled to connect through Houston. They were thrilled when we allowed them off the plane and they got home 4 hours early. Their luggage however stayed on the plane as we had no way of retrieving it. It continued onto Houston and arrived back in New Orleans later that day. Any security concerns about customers leaving their bags on the plane in this situation can be rationalized in a common sense way. That is, the passengers had no idea we were diverting to New Orleans when they boarded so no big deal. On International flights the passenger(s) would need to deal with customs and immigration which would likely cause a problem with them leaving the airplane.

I would agree that if a person insisted on being allowed off the airplane, then you really have no legal recourse to detain them, assuming that local personel can provide the required security escort.

I suspect you could get sued if you refused to even attempt to resolve the security issue.

Interesting topic.

For domestic travel, i would have to agree with calcapt. They have no clue you needed to divert or otherwise use a alternate. So why not let them off?

I just noticed a typo in the first post. Actual flights are all domestic and were scheduled AAA-BBB connecting to BBB-CCC. But the first flight diverted to CCC.

Interesting comments, however. It's always fascinating no matter how experienced one is in a subject that there is always another twist.

Thanks for the comments so far.

Something like that happened to me personally.
Going thru Chicago, diverted to Indy, destination was closer to Indy.
They let me off and I rented a car one way and got home before the airplane got off the ground.
ATA Flight.

They should know exactly what is happening and where the aircraft is landing! -- but I guess you are saying 'no clue before they left point A'.
My only occurrence with this had so many aircraft on the ground that gates couldn't handle the amount of people - we all stayed on the A/C for about an hour. If anyone wanted off any of those A/C, it would have been a security issue. - BCD