Feds join outcry over nightmare flight, but go slow on passenger rights

When federal officials 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 last 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.

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."