Cost of mistakes

Sorry for another airline related post!

  
I was on a flight recently from Dublin and as the above photo shows, there was a little incident on the taxi to takeoff. Two aircraft touched each other. The one I was on (above) incurred wing damage, the other one tail damage. I’m not going to try to guess who made a mistake, but someone did. So what did this mistake cost?
Let’s think of costs in a broad sense. Here is my thinking

• Repair costs of both aircraft 
• Lost revenue as aircraft are out of service 
• Cost of renting replacement aircraft and crew
• Cost of emergency services attending the incident
• Customer service costs e.g. passenger refunds
• Cost of buses to return passengers to the terminal 
• Increased compliance costs to ensure such mistakes do not happen again.

And there may be more. I’m just using this incident as an illustration of how we need to think of costs in a broad sense.