I have been writing about tarmac delays for a decade now. From the debacle with Northwest Airlines back in 1999 to last week’s Continental Airlines absurdity of keeping a planeload of passengers overnight within feet of a terminal. The airlines have had their chance to fix the problem. Now we need firm legislation.
It’s time to hold airline accountable. Apply major fines for tarmac delays of more than three or four hours. To make enforcement more stringent, look at perhaps putting airline CEOs in jail for one day for every hour over those four hours that they keep passengers on the tarmacs. Additional time should be served when it is found that the airplane lavatories are not functioning and that the plane does not have adequate food and water.
It has been a decade of delay for passenger rights. Now, it is time that Congress makes it clear that they will not put up with airlines acting stupidly. There must be clear rules, time limits and consequences. Congress needs to be on the side of the people, not the industry.
Way back in the year 2000, the airlines managed to convince Congress that they could police themselves. I’m not sure what the congressional reasoning was other than campaign contributions, but Senators like John McCain, once a stalwart advocate for passengers, turned into an airline pussycat after a closed door meeting.
We’ve been here before. Congress caved to the power of money or misdirected logic insuring passengers another decade of delays and tarmac horror stories.
Back in then, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced legislation to get the industry’s attention. They held highly publicized hearings in March aimed at improving airline passenger service. The McCain-Wyden bill would have require airlines to warn passengers if a flight is oversold and give them 48 hours after buying a ticket to ask for a refund.
Another bill introduced by Representative Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), a Passenger Bill of Rights, would go further, requiring airlines to compensate passengers for twice the value of their ticket if they are kept waiting on the runway for more than two hours, with compensation increasing proportionately for each extra hour.
All, eventually, to no avail. The airlines were left to their own devices. The congressional efforts and hearings were dismissed as simply political window dressing.
The airlines issued “Customer Service Commitments.” These commitments turned out to be worthless; paraded across newspaper pages and in TV news stories but never enforced by the airlines. Just in the last two years, more than 200,000 passengers have been stuck on the runways more than three hours since the airlines issued these commitments.
Today, a decade later, Congress stands at a crossroads of airline customer service. Senators and Representatives now have a clear record of airline incompetence when it comes to getting passengers off the runways when faced with long delays. As soon as an airline finished whining that regulation will make the problem worse, they strand another planeload of passengers with no legal ramifications.
The issue has been studied by the DOT ad nauseum, with no action taken against any airline. The House version of the FAA Reauthorization Act allows airlines to set timelines, but even self imposed timelines with DOT enforcement is unacceptable to airlines. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee marked up their version of the bill with a three-hour tarmac delay limit.
The airlines have had their chance — 10 years of chances. It is time to hold their feet to the fire and force them to do what they are incapable of doing on their own.
