Stuck on the runway ... again

Charles Leocha Travel columnist • Profile • E-mail

A brand new federal report shows nearly 30 percent of flights were delayed in August — more bad news following last week's report released by the Department of Transportation (DOT) inspector general on airline tarmac delays that occurred this past winter and President Bush instructing his transportation secretary to figure out a way to reduce overall air transportation system delays.

We’ve been stuck on this runway before.

Back in 1999, the poster event was a Northwest flight that was stranded in snowy Detroit for eight hours. Congress, President Clinton and Vice President Gore huffed and puffed and threatened to force better customer service, but in the end, our executives and lawmakers only whimpered and allowed the airlines to establish voluntary customer service plans.

Now, eight years later, here we go again. In December, American Airlines stranded 4,600 passengers for three hours or more. Among them was Kate Hanni who decided enough was enough and started the Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights. In February, passengers were incited yet again when JetBlue had their infamous meltdown during a Valentines Day snowstorm. These and other long runway delays by Continental, Delta, United and USAirways pushed Hanni to declare, “Prisoners of war have more rights than passengers on an airliner.”

Passengers themselves are up in arms. Thousands have joined Hanni’s coalition, and there have even been reports of passenger uprisings on stranded airplanes. It’s a national cry of, “We’re not going to take this any more.”

President Bush recently acknowledged the public’s increasing discontent, saying, “There’s a lot of anger amongst our citizens about the fact that, you know, they’re just not being treated right.”

So far, Congress and the federal bureaucracy, again, are beating their breasts, and opting, it seems, to do nothing. But with President Bush finally taking personal action with his transportation secretary, the wheels of the DOT and FAA should begin moving with more dispatch.

Dream a little dream
The dream of airlines “working together” to solve these problems is just that, a dream. In fact, these airlines are in economic combat with each other and will not volunteer anything that helps the other guy. To top it all off, the FAA and anti-trust lawyers aren’t even allowing the airline executives to gather without government supervision.

The bottom line? We need airline passenger rights legislation with teeth. We need our government to take a stand regarding over-scheduling of our busiest airports. We need Federal regulators to define acceptable tarmac and customer service delays and regulate rather than stand aside and produce studies. We need the FAA to allow the airlines to try to figure their way out of this current morass.

Passenger-rights legislation is finally working its way through Congress, and may provide a roadmap to breaking the customer-service and tarmac-delay roadblock. The recently passed House legislation is a start. Setting a timeframe of three hours of tarmac delay before the airlines have to react doesn’t seem too draconian and it may insure that supplies of food and procedures to empty overloaded toilets are in place, or that, at least, passengers can return to the terminal. Instructing the FAA to allow planes stuck on the tarmac during extended weather delays to return to the terminal without giving up their place in line gives airlines much more flexibility.

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