I would just like to bring up an incident that occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. I was flying out of Calgary to Yellowknife on Jazz, and the Yellowknife airport was having problems with fog. The regulations are such that fog doesn't actually stop the plane from landing. What it stops the plane from doing is taxiing.
So the airport was shut down in Yellowknife. We boarded the plane in Calgary. There were 20 of us on a jet. We sat in the plane for about an hour and a half until about 2:30 in the afternoon, after the pilot came on at two o'clock and said they were waiting for another report on the condition of the airport.
At 2:30 they cancelled the flight. We all got off and waited until eight o'clock at night and then flew into Yellowknife.
Well, when I was in Yellowknife I had a chance to talk to the airport manager. At 2 p.m. that day, the airport was open. They had come up with temporary provisions for taxiing service, and that allowed the airport to open regardless of the condition of the fog.
My question to you is how would you sort all of this out when it comes to show liability? To my mind, the question becomes whether the airline was interested in cancelling the flight because there weren't enough passengers on board. What went on there? How would you get to the bottom of that? What structure would you use to understand the different relationships that were going on with that flight?