I would bet that they were not 20 upper-level decision makers for Freescale. Sounds ghoulish, I know, but most companies I’ve worked for in the past 30 years had strict policies about upper management traveling together, for just this reason.
Can you imagine the future of Freescale Semiconductor if it turns out that a large portion of their Board of Directors was on that airplane?
Flying commercial ?
That is certainly a policy question, especially for companies that have corporate jets.
Looks like you were wrong. Now I am certain this is a hijack...
That would present a problem. However, to me if the 20 people were design engineers, manufacturing and production engineers experienced in chip foundry applications and applications engineers, I'd think that would be more harmful for the company.
I know the same about family owned businesses. The father and son never fly the same flights for that very reason. If something happened to both of them, the company would be in a world of hurt.
“Sounds ghoulish, I know, but most companies I’ve worked for in the past 30 years had strict policies about upper management traveling together, for just this reason.”
The company, I worked for, came to the same conclusion about 30 years ago. If possible, they would break up the number of workers to the same destination with separate flights. They started offering an extra night or two, paid by the company to split up the groups. The single people and people in bad marriages loved that option.
I doubt it would make much difference. Now if you took out the leaders of their R&D team or the top of one of their manufacturing sites that would be very different.