Airlines have gotten bad reps of late for treating delayed passengers on delayed flights like crap. Horror stories abound of planes stranded on the tarmac for hours with no a/c, no food, overflowing toilets, and other charming travel features.
So since airlines have shown no willingness to voluntarily take steps on their own to avoid such awful publicity, it’s only natural that a federal task force examining the problem has suggested … voluntary guidelines.
New policy offers little help for air travelers :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Nation
A federal task force approved voluntary guidelines Wednesday for airlines and airports dealing with passengers stranded for hours on the tarmac but produced no fixed limit on how long they can be delayed before being allowed to leave planes.
Passengers who had hoped for stronger protections were left empty-handed by the guidelines.
‘‘You have to admit that the game is still heavily weighted to business as usual,’’ Kate Hanni, a passenger rights advocate, told her fellow task force members before voting against adoption of the report.
Passenger rights advocates said the report of the tarmac task force, as it is informally known, reflected demands by airline members that they have the flexibility to design their own response plans and not be pinned to a time limit for holding passengers on tarmacs.
Right. Because airlines clearly are too stupid to have figured out, without some best practices, how to treat passengers. So now that there are some nice guidelines, I’m sure that they’ll do everything possible to stop acting like greedy gits.
Task force member Benjamin DeCosta, the aviation general manager of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, said that he favors time limits but that they need to be tailored to each airline and each airport.
‘‘This problem is so complex that one size doesn’t fit all,’’ DeCosta said.
So what sort of bizarro esoteric solutions were recommended that clearly need to be “tailored to each airline and each airport”?
The task force report recommends that
—Airlines update passengers delayed on tarmacs every 15 minutes even if there is nothing new to report.
—A secure room be provided for passengers from diverted overseas flights so they can avoid having to go through security checks when reboarding an aircraft to their final destination.
—When practical, refreshments and entertainment should be made available to passengers confined aboard aircraft awaiting takeoff.
—Airlines should make reasonable efforts to be keep airplane restrooms usable.
Um … sorry, only of those (the “secure room” could possibly be construed as something that every airline and airport should be able to provide.
The only reason airports cannot allow passengers back off of planes is because they are overcrowded and have no gate room to shift passengers back to, and it would be logististically difficult to work around that.
So, instead, it’s easier to leave passengers on planes indefnitely. Unless the airlines and airports “voluntarily” decide to do otherwise.
Which, um, clearly they haven’t been.
Idjits.
(via Ginny)