Usage of "would"

Question

I read following sentences from the BritishCouncil website. However, what I cannot understand is they way that hey have used the 'would'. In actual fact, what confuses me is why they have used "would" to refer something happened in the past. If I had written those sentences, I would have used "would have" instead of would.

To help us all get on the same page, we defined the communication norms and the rules the team would follow, as well as the meeting dates and deadlines.

As soon as they made the announcement about the cancellation, I knew I had to think quickly as it would not be likely that the flight would have capacity to take everyone from my cancelled flight.

Furthermore, please someone tell me whether following sentences, which I have modified according to my knowledge, are grammatically correct or not.

To help us all get on the same page, we defined the communication norms and the rules the team would have followed, as well as the meeting dates and deadlines.

As soon as they made the announcement about the cancellation, I knew I had to think quickly as it would not have been likely that the flight would have capacity to take everyone from my cancelled flight.

I got both of above sentences from the BritishCouncil website.

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/advanced-c1-listening/challenges-work

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

dileepaTo help us all get on the same page, we defined the communication norms and the rules the team would have followed, as well as the meeting dates and deadlines.

No. You might make it "were to follow". At the time the rules were defined, the team had not followed them yet. That lay in the future from the perspective of the writer at that time. "Would have followed" means that they never did follow them.

dileepaAs soon as they made the announcement about the cancellation, I knew I had to think quickly as it would not have been likely that the flight would have capacity to take everyone from my cancelled flight.

No. Again, from the writer's perspective at the past time when the cancellation was announced, the attempt to rebook everybody on the next flight had not happened yet, and he was thinking about a future event.

GPY · Answer

dileepaTo help us all get on the same page, we defined the communication norms and the rules the team would follow, as well as the meeting dates and deadlines.

"would" expresses future-in-the-past; i.e. "the rules the team would follow" is the past-tense version of "the rules the team will follow".

dileepaAs soon as they made the announcement about the cancellation, I knew I had to think quickly as it would not be likely that the flight would have capacity to take everyone from my cancelled flight.

I suppose "it would not be likely that the flight would have capacity" is intended as the past tense of "it will not be likely that the flight will have capacity". In fact, though, we would not normally say that. We would say "it is not likely that the flight will have capacity". This translates to past tense "it was not likely that the flight would have capacity", which to me seems a more straightforward way of expressing the meaning that I think is intended.

dileepaTo help us all get on the same page, we defined the communication norms and the rules the team would have followed, as well as the meeting dates and deadlines.

No.

dileepaAs soon as they made the announcement about the cancellation, I knew I had to think quickly as it would not have been likely that the flight would have capacity to take everyone from my cancelled flight.

This is intelligible but the overcomplication of "would not have been likely" is unnecessary if the intention is just to put "it is not likely" into the past.

Usage of "would"

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