Planes idle; complaints soar

When Peter Burkholder and his wife boarded a Continental Airlines flight to Minneapolis in June, they endured a predicament that's becoming a trademark of the busy summer flying season: Their plane never left the ground.

Instead, they sat on the tarmac at Newark Liberty International Airport for eight hours — five hours longer than the flight itself — waiting for weather and air-traffic congestion to clear. In the end, Flight 370 was canceled shortly after midnight, according to details provided by Burkholder and Continental.

"We just kept thinking, this is going to end," said Burkholder, of Morristown, N.J., who was flying to a friend's wedding. "If I could, I would never fly again."

Flight 370 is an extreme example of one of the latest and most aggravating headaches for air travelers — and one of the airline industry's fastest-growing public-relations problems: planes stranded on the tarmac for hours.

The major carriers, operating with crowded planes and crammed flying schedules, have precious little wiggle room to accommodate passengers when bad weather or computer glitches interrupt operations. JetBlue learned this the hard way when a Valentine's Day ice storm left six flights stranded on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport for more than five hours.

Airline-industry experts say the busy summer-travel season could turn out to be even worse.

According to Flightstats.com, more than a third of Newark Airport's departures in June were 15 minutes late, and more than half of those — 4,509 flights — were more than 45 minutes late.

The anger of passengers left waiting on tarmacs is fueling a movement to impose a three-hour limit on tarmac delays and to provide more money for federal regulators to investigate customer complaints. A group called the Coalition for Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights is lobbying Congress to legislate the changes, but the industry opposes a government-mandated passenger-rights bill.

"Congress cannot legislate good weather or the best way to respond to bad weather because every situation is unique," James May, president and chief executive of the Air Transport Association, said earlier this year. "Airlines need the flexibility to deal with each delay individually to help ensure that the fewest people are inconvenienced."

In aviation parlance, June 8 was a severe-weather day. A storm system aggravated delays that had begun early in the day when a computer failure prevented flight plans from being processed for air-traffic controllers.

And yet when Burkholder and his wife, Martha Hill, reached their gate for a 4:05 p.m. departure, the status read: "On time."

Minutes after the plane pulled away from the gate, however, it became clear Flight 370 would not escape the rippling effect of the massive air traffic tie-up.

During the wait, a ground crew refueled the plane, and twice a van drove up to retrieve a few passengers who wanted to leave and to resupply dwindling snacks and ice. Then, eight hours after the scheduled departure, the pilot broke the news to his weary passengers: Continental had canceled the flight.

While Flight 370 sat idling, passengers said they received limited information about when the flight would depart and what their options were for later flights. Afterward, they were left scrambling to salvage vacations and business trips, and to fight for compensation from the airline.

Peter Martin described the ordeal as the "flight from hell."

Continental acknowledged an air-traffic control computer malfunction, coupled with severe weather, posed serious challenges June 8.

"Given those challenges, flights were operating at Newark and we were expecting to get clearance for Flight 370 to depart," spokeswoman Mary Clark said in an e-mail. "Ultimately, crew scheduling issues caused the cancellation of the flight."

Robert Mann, an airline industry consultant in Port Washington, N.Y., said airline service has been declining steadily over the past three decades.

"Customers have come to expect less and less. That's really sad," he said. "It means customers are upset with you before they start using your service."

Congress is scheduled to vote on a passenger bill of rights in the fall as part of an aviation legislation package.