When the plane is next to the runway and the doors are open the ground crew is in and out. Have they boarded?
If someone stole your ticket and were seated in your seat and you came along and proved it was your ticket, have you or the person in your seat boarded?
I always assumed boarding was a process, not an event. On every flight I took there is a time when the doors are closed and one cannot access or deboard the plane. It is then that I understand the process has ended.
To me, boarding is a concept that applies only to passengers and not to crew. crew are always special cased since they help operate the passenger vessel. passengers are conveyed by the vessel. The passengers have to board the vessel at the embarkation point and then they are conveyed by the vessel to their destination.
in the case of a stolen ticket, there might be ambiguity. there would be legally boarded and illegally boarded, i imagine. but that distinction was moot in the case of dr. dao. his ticket was issued to him.
i think there is passenger boarding and there is a vessel boarding process. the process is a number of ordered steps defined in a procedure. passenger boarding refers to what the passenger does. he is holding a ticket which reputedly allows him and only him to board. his process starts when he gets the ticket and then is issued the boarding pass. then he goes through a gate and steps into the passenger transport vessel. It is an individual procedure.
Maybe it is analogous to an individual right in contrast to a collective right. One can always attempt to blur boundaries to something meaningless by re-interpreting an individual right as a collective right. But is that the correct thing to do?
Say your concept is correct. Then what happens when the doors are closed and then opened again to allow another person in or out, before the plane departs? Does that re-interpret the status of each individual’s “boarding” on the plane? Does each person’s boarding status flip flop every time the door is opened and closed? (No, I would assert that it obviously does not do so.)
What am I missing?