Originally Posted by
sbm12
Umm...that's not how the legal system is supposed to work.
Sure it is. CO was bad here, but we can't fine CO for "being bad." Let's figure out what piece fo the law CO broke with respect to this incident and nail them on that.
Sure, if you cannot catch a gangster actually killing someone but you get them on tax fraud that is a real violation of the law still.
How is that a relevant example? They nailed CO (and the others) on something related to the incident. Your example isn't even related to the incident in question.
A more relevant example is if you're driving on the freeway like a maniac. There's no law that says you can't "drive like a maniac." But the officer saw you, and you and he both know it was wrong, and now the officer has to figure out what piece of the law to cite you on. Could be just speeding, excessive lane changes, following to closely, whatever.
There is no law that says passengers must be allowed off a plane in X hours. But there is a law that says you may not deceive customers. CO states they'll get you off the plane in 3 hours and did not do that.
In this case, however, Mesaba basically was just a bunch of schmucks. They told the CoEx plane to show up and that they'd handle it. On arrival they didn't handle it so well. And now they're being fined. I get the Co/CoEx fine as there was something published that they didn't adhere to.
"The consent order covering Mesaba finds that the carrier engaged in an unfair and deceptive practice when it provided inaccurate information to ExpressJet about deplaning passengers from flight 2816."
Mesaba wasn't being a schmuck, they actually said they could not offload the plane, and blamed TSA, which was inaccurate. Had Mesaba not lied, then I'd be more inclined to agree with you. It's not that their staff had all gone home, rather it's that they incorrectly told CO they couldn't do it, hence the deception.
The insinuation behind using this type of logic is that Mesaba did that because they're competitors and wanted to hurt them. While we'll never know if that's true or not (and it very well may not be), it demonstrates that you have to play above board. It's very similar to how airlines are with spare parts -- they buy them off each other all the time. But they cannot deliberately withhold parts from each other in order to cause harm the other carrier.