Q&A
Call it a ticket to frustration. On Valentine's Day, hundreds of people flying JetBlue Airways were stranded for more than six hours in planes parked on the runways at John F. Kennedy airport in New York as pilots waited for icy weather to clear. Some reports described overflowing toilets and passengers without food or water.
As a response, JetBlue announced last week it is enacting a "customer bill of rights." Passengers who experience long delays onboard an airplane will be compensated the full price of their roundtrip tickets. Some in Congress want to go further and create a federal bill of rights. Kevin Mitchell, founder and chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, a group representing corporate travel buyers, says the bill of rights idea is more trouble than it's worth. He watched when a similar proposal was defeated in the 1990s.
How common are these long delays on the tarmac, anyway?
If you look at the number of instances where the aircraft was stuck out on the runway away from the gate for five or more hours, it's happened just 330 times since the January 1999 Northwest [Airlines] debacle in Detroit, where basically thousands of people were stranded on planes on the tarmac over New Year's weekend, the original major tarmac-waiting incident. In that same period-if we're counting up until the end of 2006-there have been 88 million flights total. It's not really a number [of delays] ... that would seem to rise to the level of national seriousness that requires congressional intervention.
You say the bill of rights would hurt passengers. How?
Early proposals say that planes would have to find a way to evacuate passengers that want to leave if they've been on the tarmac in a plane for three hours or more. I think people are really ignoring a more crucial statistic: the probably tens of thousands of flights each year that are out on the runway for three hours that then eventually take off and get passengers to their destination. And that doesn't just benefit the people onboard the aircraft: It also helps people in the destination cities that need those same airplanes for their own flights to the next city. It's a giant ripple effect.
What do you think will happen in Congress this time around?
I think once Congress ... hears from aviation experts, I think they'll be rightfully terrified of the gridlock these proposals could cause. Airlines will be more likely to cancel flights if there are more reimbursements for delays. They'll also have to hire more staff to replace flight crews [stuck on the ground in some cities]. It's going to add major costs for the airlines, and those are only going to trickle down to the average person-and to airfares. I think Congress will eventually back down.
Could airlines handle more cancellations at this point?
That's one of the main problems . ... Today airlines are selling about 80 percent of the seats on most flights. And on some of these more popular routes in and out of major hubs-like in New York and Chicago and Dallas and so on-planes are 90 or 100 percent full on average. ... Can you imagine if you're a businessperson flying out of Chicago to Los Angeles for a business meeting, and your flight gets canceled after three hours of waiting? You're going to be hopping mad because there's a good chance you won't get on another flight for two days.
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