LOWY: Airline passengers suffer as government dallies

OPINION/ANALYSIS:

When 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 the mess.

Over recent years, nightmare strandings on airport 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 last week 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 down 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 John F. Kennedy International Airport for nearly 11 hours.

After those incidents, Transportation Department Inspector General Calvin Scovel III 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 Ms. 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.

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