After years of stutter steps, the federal government finally has made a great stride toward improving the lot of passengers who find themselves trapped inside delayed planes.
The U.S. Department of Transportation gave notice Monday it will begin routinely punishing air carriers that keep passengers on runways for more than three hours.
It’s a welcome change that is a long time coming.
The new regulations, announced by DOT chief Ray LaHood, also require airlines to give passengers food and water when delays reach two hours, and to maintain functioning toilets for the duration.
It’s astonishing that such bare- bones standards of treatment would seem revolutionary, but given the conditions that passengers have been forced to endure in recent years, it’s clear they are a radical change.
Consider what unfolded on a runway in Rochester, Minn., last summer:
After being forced down by thunderstorms, 47 people were stuck on a small plane for six hours, amid crying babies and a smelly toilet even though they were only 50 yards from the terminal.
The situation was complicated by the fact the airport was closed, and only one airline had employees on duty. Those employees refused to allow the passengers to deplane.
The Rochester incident, for which three airlines were fined a total of $175,000, is only one of a string of such debacles.
The recurring nature of such abuses has led to proposed federal legislation, and now, the new DOT rules.
The airlines, which object to the new rules and say they’ll cause more cancellations and greater delays, have only themselves to blame.
If the airlines had taken substantive steps to stop such tarmac horror stories instead of just paying lip service to the issue, they wouldn’t face the hard and fast deadlines and fines of $27,500 for each passenger held in excess of the three-hour limit.
The bill pending in Congress, co-authored by Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, also would have imposed a three-hour limit.
The new rules not only do that, they go even further, giving passenger-rights advocates the lion’s share of what they’ve been seeking.
The new regulations, however, do allow for exemptions in cases where pilots and air traffic controllers deem that security or safety would be at risk if the three-hour limit were enforced.
The rules announced by LaHood take effect in April. Until then, expect to hear a lot of squawking from airline representatives who would rather have the kind of discretion they’ve had for years.
We hope the administration will stick to its guns on these new rules, keeping the safety and rights of passengers paramount.
