DOT proposes no penalties for runway delays

With the clamor rising for an “airline passengers bill of rights” amid horror stories of fliers left to stew in crowded planes for hours on the runway, Transportation Department investigators Tuesday recommended that airlines provide accurate on-time data for all of their flights, but proposed no new penalties to protect stranded customers.

In a report issued a little more than seven months after a Valentine’s Day ice storm grounded more than 1,000 JetBlue flights — marooning tens of thousands of passengers who complained that they ran out of food, water and patience with overflowing toilets — the agency’s inspector general essentially promised to tattle to Congress if airlines don’t follow the written procedures they already have in place.

Otherwise, the report offers no stick with which to prod the airlines to reduce runway delays and to ease passengers’ conditions on grounded flights. Instead, it advised studying the problem further and requiring airlines to give passengers more information ahead of time about the most unreliable flights.

Chain reaction from delayed takeoffs, landings
Transportation Secretary Mary Peters commissioned the report in February, two weeks after the JetBlue meltdown at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It was the most severe in a series of incidents in which passengers complained that they had been stranded onboard planes backed up on runways for as long as 10½ hours, in many cases long after food and water had run out and toilets had been rendered useless.

The report identifies several causes for such incidents, most having to do with delayed takeoffs and landings that create a chain reaction, blocking other planes from using the airline system’s limited number of gates.

So far this year, 28 percent of flights have been delayed, canceled or diverted, which would be a record if the trend holds through the rest of the year, the report says.

Moreover, those initial delays are getting longer, and again, if the trends so far this year hold, 2007 would set another record, with takeoff delays reaching an average 57 minutes.

And the culprit there is reduced capacity driven by the financially troubled airlines’ determination to wring more efficiency out of their schedules. But the reduced load is being aggravated by increased demand, the report said.

By the end of 2007, compared with 2000, the major domestic airlines will have tried to squeeze 12 percent more passengers into 9 percent fewer seats on 9 percent fewer flights. “With more
seats filled, air carriers have fewer options to accommodate passengers from canceled flights,” the report concluded.

Passengers flood government with complaints
It is probably no surprise, then, that consumer complaints against U.S. airlines in the first seven months of 2007 have already surpassed the total number of complaints all of last year, according to the Transportation Department’s Air Travel Consumer Reports. Complaints relating specifically to delays, cancellations and missed connections more than doubled.

“Airlines, airports, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and DOT must work together to reduce long, on-board delays and minimize the impact on passengers when these delays occur,” the report says.

But instead of holding the airlines’ feet to the fire with the threat of legal action or fines, the report instead calls for further study and offers a list of suggestions to address the problems.

The report calls on airlines, airports and the FAA to convene a task force to develop contingency plans to deal with lengthy delays, and it says the Transportation Department should require airlines to give passengers more information about individual flights’ on-time records ahead of time without being asked. Airlines should be required to set targets to reduce chronically delayed or canceled flights and draw up plans to take care of passengers burdened by a delayed flight.

But the report proposes no penalty for failure to comply, limiting itself to calling on the Office of Aviation Enforcement and Proceedings to “advise Congress if the airlines retreat from such policies.”

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