AJC wrote:

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 11:39:29 -0500, nobody wrote:

Where the airline should be held responsible is in using some inadequate
airfield. They could have diverted to Portland, Victoria or Vancouver and not
wait until they had runned out of fuel and needing to land at the nearest
piece of runway they could find.

In fact, in hindsight, they would have been better off landing at vancouver
and busing passengers to seattle, or land at victoria and hop on the ferry to seattle.

Surely this wasn't the only intl flight coming into Seattle ? How di dother
flights get handled ?



I believe one issue is that it was a DC10 and therefore unable to land
when other better equipped aircraft could have done. From what I've
read elsewhere, if it had been one of NW's new A330s they could have
landed at SEA.

But that still doesn't explain why they couldn't have landed at an
airport equipped to deal with the customs issues. PDX had gorgeous
weather that day. They could have landed there.