Just going on what Alan Joyce told me on Wednesday.

Andrew J,

No - one can hold you captive - except airport officials...

If you think its as simple as saying "Excuse me, I'm getting off, see ya", then you're very, very wrong. Give it a go in a diversion airport sometime and see what sort of response you get.

Don't be surprised if weapons are involved in some parts of the world.

Usually the crew would be more than happy for you to get off. The local officials less so.

Dave Hughes & John Hewson tried it when they diverted to AVV instead of MEL. They were not allowed off and ended up missing the show they were flying in for.

How silly.

If I was bound for BNE via SYD, I wouldn't fly BNE/SYD to then turn around & fly SYD/BNE.

I would have got suddenly really sick & demanded a Dr/paramedic & got off the aircraft in BNE.

All you have to say in heart pains !!!

And waste the time of the doctor and paramedic when they could attend to a real emergency? How selfish of you.

Agreed, the turn around was 55 min which I thought was pretty good considering there were at least 4 other SYD-bound flights waiting to go.

So sad to see some just look out for themselves...

I was on a LAX-SYD flight that got diverted to HNL because of patient who had chest pain, due to a late departure from LAX we ended up being diverted to BNE as crew were out of hours before flying onto SYD, the BNE bound folk were not too pleased, I had to connect to MEL so it ended it being an interesting flight home that day as i missed by MCO-LAX direct flight and ended up flying MCO-MEM-LAX-HNL-BNE-SYD-MEL ... needless to say i think i slept for 24hours straight by the time i got home!

As for faking chest pain, working for the Ambulance Service in Melbourne this is not a shocking story, people pay an ambulance membership and automatically assume they are entitled to use it as taxi, it's amazing the number of times crews are dealing with a paper cut when they could be responding to someone who will actually die without urgent medical intervention.

Oh well, thats life i guess.

Something similar happened in Gatwick.

http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/a...-1226168460719