It's interesting that you want someone to respond who's not in a position to. And I say that, because there are other, deeper questions here, that someone who has never been in the business would think or know to ask.
The airport manager is correct. They could have let the people off the aircraft, provided that the people stayed in the concourse. Some airports have a gate that comes down in front of the checkpoint for the night, and nobody can get out. Otherwise, they will have a guard that stays overnight, but in those cases, you can go out, but you can't come back in.
Now, with that said, and the airline being wrong, lying, whatever, there's still an important fact that you left out.
From the story: "That's not the end of it. Adding to the problems for the passengers on Continental Flight 2816: Continental does not serve Rochester, Minn. And, according to the Post-Bulletin, cooperation with Delta – which does fly to the airport – may have been yet another issue."
By the way, for those who didn't catch this, we are talking about Rochester MINNESOTA, **NOT** Rochester, NY.
Sooooo, what this means is that when the plane arrives, they have to have a gate to go to. And someone to ground handle the plane. It sounds like they had neither. In fact, at the time they landed, there may have been nobody in the airport. Checkpoint gate closed, and nobody, not even a mouse. (which is good because if one of the little ba---ards runs up the landing gear the plane is grounded for a C check - they love to chew wires)
Here's what this all boils down to. It sounds like they came up with the TSA thing before they knew what all happened. I don't know, but certainly the best choice would to have at least said "We don't know yet, we are still investigating."
The bigger problem here that I have to ask is why would they land at Ghost town airport for a diversion??? Although the next closest CO city looks like Eau Claire, WI, which would have been quite a bit further away, so that would tell me that they had to get that plane on the ground NOW for fuel. It's a solid 3 hour flight from Houston to MSP, and the NWS may not have projected bad enough weather for MSP when they left Houston, so they would not have had to have an alternate airport on the flight plan, and hence no alternate fuel. So Rochester may have been that or nothing.
But this brings up something that Kate Hani needs to try to push for, actually 2 things. First, if an airplane needs to divert, they should first try for a city that the airline or one of it's partners serves. However, each airport needs to have an airline, or a couple airlines that, if and airplane MUST divert to that city, the other designated airline can ground handle it. Even with that in place, there would still be issues of no gates to spare at times, but in a case like this, you wouldn't have Delta pissing around about if they were going to help or not.
With all of that, I will say that I agree with PHX to some degree. I understand this is a major complaint, after all, Butch didn't post about some lost bag or something, but at the same time, are we going to start posting every news story that is published about every little thing that goes wrong out there?
I guess I see both sides of this, simply because this is a big deal complaint, but at what point do the floodgates open up where people are just posting other people's war stories?
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