Greg76248

formeraa

If you were to leave the aircraft when a crew member specifically told you to stay onboard, it could be construed as a violation of a passenger's duty to "obey crewmember's instructions".

deeruck

On the ground with the door open?

steve64

Another of your replies that sound great from a pure common sense point of view, but is nowhere close to how an airline operates.
I worked many positions in my 20 year career at AA, one being Load Control (weight-n-balance).
From an operations perspective, the flight from the diversion airport to the scheduled arrival airport is a completely new flight. Weight & Balance will be calculated from scratch.
To your point, we'll say the passenger & bag counts as well as freight & mail weights are identical to the previous take-off. What has (most likely) drastically changed is the fuel load.
And more importantly, this take-off will be from a different runway. Different temperature. Different winds. Literally, a different flight.
But it's all computerized. Once I learn about the diversion, it takes a few minutes to set-up the "new" flight's Load Plan. The passenger/bags/freight/mail will be about the only data copied from the previous flight.
If/when I learn about any changes (IE: we offloaded 5 passengers), it takes about 5 seconds to update the plan. The computer will re-calc the plan each time I update it so I can watch to see if we're trending towards a limit. However, the final calculation usually doesn't happen until the plane is pushing out. It isn't until I receive a "close" from both the Gate Agent and the Ground Crew, that I will "close" the Load Plan (making it available to the pilots in the cockpit). Last minute updates are actually the SOP.

I don't think the blanket advice should be that passengers can "just get off the plane" anytime it suits them. Airline employees will not like the loss of control of knowing exactly who is on the plane. Either they know/control exactly who is getting off, or they keep everyone on or they deplane the whole flight (and re-scan boarding passes on a 2nd boarding). Loss of control means a re-count once the flight is ready to depart. It's not only a precise count, but the manifest also. If that count is off by one, a lot of Captains will not depart until the computer Passenger Manifest is resolved.

JonNYC

Bravo!