Originally Posted by
danger
Originally Posted by
UKtravelbear
District Court Judgments aren't binding on other judges. There could be dozens of other rulings that say the opposite. Of course Bott and Co are going to push the one they agree with,
It would take a higher court ruling to make it binding. And I could see an airline taking this all the way to the Supreme Court if they felt it necessary.
It needs to be recognised here that what is actually being determined, most likely, is not what constitutes extraordinary circumstances, but rather whether or not the airline took all reasonable measures in sections 12, 14 & 15.
Originally Posted by EC261
(12) The trouble and inconvenience to passengers caused by cancellation of flights should also be reduced. This should be achieved by inducing carriers to inform passengers of cancellations before the scheduled time of departure and in addition to offer them reasonable re-routing, so that the passengers can make other arrangements. Air carriers should compensate passengers if they fail to do this, except when the cancellation occurs in extraordinary circumstances which could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken.
(14) As under the Montreal Convention, obligations on operating air carriers should be limited or excluded in cases where an event has been caused by extraordinary circumstances which could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken. Such circumstances may, in particular, occur in cases of political instability, meteorological conditions incompatible with the operation of the flight concerned, security risks, unexpected flight safety shortcomings and strikes that affect the operation of an operating air carrier.
(15) Extraordinary circumstances should be deemed to exist where the impact of an air traffic management decision in relation to a particular aircraft on a particular day gives rise to a long delay, an overnight delay, or the cancellation of one or more flights by that aircraft, even though all reasonable measures had been taken by the air carrier concerned to avoid the delays or cancellations.
At LGW and LHR, where BA has large bases and reserve crew, if they cancelled because of a crew shortage they would not have taken all reasonable measures. At LCY, with Cityflyer, there's a good argument the same applies - maybe also at JFK given the significance of the base in the operation. If a crew member fell ill on rotation at, say, OSL it would not be reasonable to expect BA to find another crew member at no notice.
Consequently, in grey areas such as these individual circumstances will always influence the court's view, and you simply can't rely on one judgment in one circumstance carrying over to another that might be slightly different and therefore fail the reasonableness test.