The airline passenger's bill of rights

OPINION

By Ed Hewitt

updated 2:06 p.m. ET Feb. 16, 2007

Way back in the last century, during the winter of 1999, Northwest Airlines famously stranded a plane full of passengers on a tarmac for eight horrific hours. Without food, water, working toilets, honest or timely information, or the simple ability to walk off the plane despite being a couple hundred yards from the terminal gate at a major airport, the passengers were subject to an almost inhuman experience in a metal canister.

Sound familiar? That's because the same thing happened again — twice within the past two months. In December 2006 it was American Airlines, which stranded passengers for eight hours on a tarmac in Austin, Texas, shortly before New Year's while planes took off and landed all around them. Then, during a winter storm on February 14, 10 JetBlue flights were significantly delayed at New York's Kennedy airport — one for a whopping 11 hours.

You may recall the firestorm of media controversy after the 1999 incident; when passengers sued for "false imprisonment and breach of contract," the media got hold of the story, and well, the rest is history. The endgame was the introduction of a voluntary Customer Service Initiative from the airlines that was supposed to ensure that this sort of thing never happened again — not that anyone believed it.

Rewind to 1999
I was traveling on Northwest that fateful weekend, and wrote about my experience at length in a letter to Northwest that we published on The Independent Traveler, and that subsequently was heavily forwarded, printed and shared among Internet-savvy travelers.

Granted, the worst of Northworst's (as the airline was dubbed) problems were caused by having a major hub in the middle of a major storm — but if you read my letter, you'll find that my problems started days before the first snowflake hit the ground. The real problem was much more institutional arrogance that had riddled the airlines from the top brass to the check-in counter — and not only at Northwest. It soon became evident that my experience was just an amplified, drawn-out version of what many travelers were experiencing at the airport and in the air on an almost daily or even hourly basis; the storm and the media fallout just brought everything to a head.

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In the aftermath, the airlines issued denials, made excuses and generally CYA'd; meanwhile, consumer advocates railed, consumers told and retold their own tales of woe online and on television, and ultimately legislators started to call for heads to roll, if only to stop their phones from ringing.

With public opinion almost unanimously lined up against them, and the specter of actual legislation casting visible shadows, the airlines quickly went officially into mea culpa mode and produced the supposedly self-governing Customer Service Initiative, a document of cheery promises and pledges that each airline was obliged to draw up and post prominently on its Web site.

Slide show   Treacherous travel A storm that blasted the Midwest blew snow eastward, paralyzing travel. Click to view images.

As almost every industry pundit and expert noted at the time, the initiatives were in fact little more than a PR-savvy repackaging of the existing airline Contract of Carriage, a document that does its level best to absolve the issuer of responsibility. Sure, it was in nice sugary language, and the airlines ate a bit of crow for effect, but the new initiatives had almost no teeth. The whole thing amounted to Congress forcing the airlines to take a pledge to do better, and when the TV cameras went away, it was business as usual for the airlines, with a few big checks cut to lobbyists and public relations firms. Whew.

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