Originally Posted by
dwallfort
i was dealyed on a flight from Rio for 20 hours towards the end of last year due to a sick captain.
Welcome to Flyertalk,
dwalfort. Welcome to the BA board, and though it's a pity that this incident has brought you here, I nevertheless hope that you can continue to participate. Welcome again.
I suspect the individual details matter a lot. If the captain fell ill in the hour or two before departure from Rio that would be one extreme, the other would be a captain falling sick 3 days before departure from LHR. You'd then be down to how the court would intepret that. If the captain was ill just before departure, BA will say "well the rules say 2 fit pilots in this situation, we didn't have a spare pilot in Rio and we could hardly ask the CSD to give it a go". Then the court would have to decide if BA could have avoided that by reasonable counter measures. Sounds tricky to me, but as I say the details will matter.