DOT secretary orders investigations of aircraft groundings
Andrew Compart, Travel Weekly, 2/27/2007
Transportation Secretary Mary Peters asked the Department of Transportation's inspector general to review recent incidents on American and JetBlue in which passengers were stuck on board grounded aircraft for more than six hours.
Peters asked the inspector general, Calvin Scovel, to assess why the American and JetBlue situations occurred and to examine the airlines' customer-service commitments, contracts of carriage and policies dealing with extended ground delays with passengers aboard aircraft.
Peters also wants the inspector to provide specific recommendations for what can be done by airlines, airports and the government, including her own department, to prevent a recurrence.
"I have serious concerns about airlines' contingency planning that allows passengers to sit on the tarmac for hours on end," Peters said. "It is imperative that airlines do everything possible to ensure that situations like these do not occur again."
Peters did not give the inspector a deadline, but described the matter as "urgent."
American's problems occurred Dec. 29, when passengers were stuck for up to nine hours on aircraft that were grounded in Austin, Texas. American said thunderstorms across all of Texas, "one of the most unusual weather circumstances we've seen in 20 years," forced the flight diversions to Austin and left passengers stuck on multiple planes there.
JetBlue's problems occurred during a winter storm in New York on Feb. 14. Some of its passengers were stuck on grounded planes for as long as 10 hours. JetBlue said "inefficiencies in its response plans" were partly to blame and said it was making immediate changes, including "new communications strategies with in-flight and pilot crewmembers in the event of a system disruption."
This won't be the first time the DOT has reviewed these types of incidents. In 1999, the DOT assembled a team to look into incidents in which passengers in Detroit were stuck on Northwest aircraft, grounded by a snowstorm, for two to eight hours without food, drink or usable restrooms.
The DOT report concluded that Northwest contributed to the problem because of inadequate planning and poor communications, a decision to continue a limited schedule while other airlines had canceled all of their flights and a failure to take or attempt some measures that could have gotten passengers off the aircraft.
At the time, Northwest said it disagreed with the report's conclusions, but also that it had made 15 changes in procedures and planning to prevent a recurrence.
The Northwest incident, and U.S. airline service problems in general, led to calls for Congress to pass a passenger bill of rights. The U.S. airline industry forestalled that effort, however, by adopting a voluntary customer-service commitment.
The DOT's inspector general has periodically reviewed customer-service commitments. After one of those reviews, the inspector concluded that airlines needed to establish comprehensive customer service plans that specified the efforts that would be made to get passengers off the aircraft when flights were delayed for extended periods.