Frigid temperatures this weekend prompt cold weather advisories

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

When officials in Washington learned 47 people were stuck overnight aboard a small plane at a Minnesota airport, Capitol Hill
reverberated with demands to protect the public from a recurrence,
and the Obama administration launched an investigation.


      But in its hunt for blame, the government isn't owning up to the
fact that it had a hand in letting the mess happen, too.

      Over recent years, nightmare strandings on the runway have
prompted lots of political posturing, but few results.

      The problem continues. From January to June this year, 613
planes were delayed on tarmacs for more than three hours, their
passengers kept on board, the government says.

      None created the stir that Continental Express Flight 2816 did
after it was diverted Friday night to an airport in Rochester,
Minn. Passengers were forced to sit for more than six hours in a
cramped plane with crying babies and a stinking toilet, even though
the plane stood only 50 yards from a terminal.

      "It strikes me as very dysfunctional that neither the
Department of Transportation nor the Congress has seen fit to bring
some meaningful guidelines to this area," said Ken Mead, a former
Transportation Department inspector general. "I have to ask
myself, what does it take?"

      Congress and the Clinton administration tried to do something
after a January 1999 blizzard kept Northwest Airlines planes on the
ground in Detroit, trapping passengers for seven hours. 


Some new
regulations were put in place but most proposals died, including
one that airlines pay passengers who are kept waiting on a runway
for more than two hours.


      Later episodes left the status quo in place, despite attempts by
some in government to find a remedy.

      In December 2006, lightning storms and a tornado warning shut
the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, causing American Airlines to divert
more than 100 flights and stranding passengers on some planes for
as long as nine hours.

      Two months later, snow and ice led JetBlue Airways to leave
planes full of passengers sitting on the tarmac at New York's
Kennedy International Airport for nearly 11 hours.
      


After those incidents, Transportation Department Inspector
General Calvin Scovel recommended that airlines be required to set
a limit on the time passengers have to wait out travel delays
grounded inside an airplane.


      Mary Peters, who was transportation secretary under former
President George W. Bush, proposed requiring airlines to have
contingency plans for stranded passengers. 


The idea was that if
airlines include these plans in their "contract of carriage" -
the fine print on an airline ticket - consumers can hold them
responsible in court if they break their promise.
     


 An industry-dominated panel set up by the government debated the
matter for 11 months, then issued a report in November 2008 that
offered only guidelines for what a model plan should look like.

      Neither those guidelines nor Peters' still-pending proposed rule
contain a specific limit on how long passengers can be kept waiting
before being allowed to return to a gate.


 The airlines and Bush
administration officials said each company is so different that a
single time limit would cause more problems than it solves.

      Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Peters' successor, has said
he will consider the experience of Flight 2816 as he weighs what
action to take on the pending rule.

      After the JetBlue strandings at JFK, New York state lawmakers
enacted a "passenger bill of rights" requiring airlines to
provide food, water, working toilets and fresh air for passengers
held on tarmacs more than three hours. 

The law was thrown out last
year by a U.S. appeals court, which ruled that individual states
cannot make laws regulating airlines. That discouraged other states
from trying.

      In Congress two years ago, Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and
Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, introduced a bill similar to the New York
law. It attracted only 12 co-sponsors, including the junior senator
from Illinois, Barack Obama. That bill, however, also lacked a
specific time limit on strandings.

      This year, Boxer and Snowe have reintroduced their bill and
added a three-hour time limit, among other consumer protections.

The bill would give airline captains the power to extend a tarmac
wait by a half-hour beyond the three-hour limit if there is reason
to believe takeoff clearance is likely to come soon. The captain
could also keep passengers from returning to the gate if doing so
is deemed unsafe.

      The bill, now part of larger legislation governing the Federal
Aviation Administration, is expected to be voted on by the Senate
in September, with the possibility the time limit will come out of
it. A House FAA bill passed in the spring has no time limit.

      The airline industry, in opposing a limit on tarmac delays,
argues that more flights will be canceled and passengers will spend
more time in terminals trying to get on a flight to their
destination than if they had continued to wait in the plane.

      Kenneth Quinn, a former FAA general counsel, said there is no
reason for the Transportation Department to further delay requiring
airlines to put contingency plans in their contracts of carriage.

He said the department has the power to fine airlines that engage
in deceptive practices, which would include violating a contingency
plan.


      "Somebody needs to step into the void before more passengers
get stranded without any recourse," said Quinn, an attorney with
the Pillsbury law firm in Washington.

      Passengers' rights advocates said voluntary guidelines and
allowing airlines to write their own contingency plans won't work.
They want a time limit.

      "No one believes the airlines are going to make any effort to
fix this on their own," said FlyersRights.org founder Kate Hanni,
who was a passenger on one of the Dallas planes in 2006. "The only
time they have made any effort is when the threat of legislation
was very real."

Gallery

Oberstar: stalled legislation could have helped stranded passengers

Transportation Department to investigate flight grounded in Rochester

Passenger recounts night spent trapped on Rochester runway

Continental Airlines apologizes for stranding passengers

Business and Economic News

When officials in Washington learned 47 people were stuck overnight aboard a small plane at the Rochester, Minn., airport, they called for changes to protect travelers. But the federal government had a hand in letting the mess happen, too.

Analysis: Gov't dallies, airline passengers suffer

Go Deeper.

Like this?