Napa, CA – April 22, 2009: Delta flight 510 from Turks and Caicos bound for Atlanta on April 10th, 2009 started out like any other flight for vacationing tourists who had spent a week in the sunny Caribbean paradise. The passengers, spring breakers, families, and retirees were tired and a little depressed that their vacations were over, but they had no idea how their vacation would end.
The flight was scheduled to land at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta at 5:04 pm, but the plane circled for a while due to thunderstorms below, and was ultimately diverted to Columbia, S.C. Metropolitan Airport where it landed at 5:44 pm. And there they sat, and sat, and sat. Five and a half hours later they were finally permitted to get off the plane - not into the terminal, but into a cold, stark room with about 20 folding chairs. Over 120 passengers, US citizens guarded by armed security personnel and police, and nowhere for men, women and children to sit but a cold, concrete floor. “One elderly woman had to be removed from our “cell” by paramedics,” said one passenger.
There were passengers taking videos during this ordeal. We urge them come forward so the public at large can see what it's like being stuck for six hours on the tarmac, then thrown into a dungeon for three hours and treated like criminals in their own country.
Congress is currently considering a new FAA Reauthorization bill that several consumer groups have urged that passengers’ rights legislation be included that define specific limits for tarmac delays, and that would require airlines and airports to develop contingency plans for such emergencies.
This latest stranding event is outrageous. Here again we have senior citizens and children trapped without food and water. And neither the airport nor the airline had a plan, despite Delta's voluntary "commitments" to deal effectively with these tarmac strandings.
FlyersRights.org has 25,000 members and is the largest non-profit airline passengers rights coalition in the U.S. The organization operates a toll-free hotline 1-877-359-3776 to assist stranded airline passengers. Please contact Kate Hanni at 707-337-0328 or or Kate@flyersrights.com.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
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1 comments:
It seems that merely focusing on a particular airline’s passenger handling capabilities during irregular operations may be shortsighted.
I’d like to offer a consideration of some basic economics.
It’s largely true that most carriers do not maintain a personnel force which is robust enough for handling the real-time contingencies required for nullifying events such as the one described above. And if they did, this level of readiness would be reflected in the cost of a ticket. In turn, this would cause potential passengers to look elsewhere for air travel. So in effect, passengers actually turn away from paying up front for the higher level of service which they demand, after the fact, when normal operations begin to deteriorate. In a sense, they are looking for an entitlement.
This line of reasoning, based on the reality of economics, most often leads to the counter argument that air carriers should be forced to just ‘do the right thing’ once normal operations go awry. And it seems that this is what a proposed ‘Passenger Bill of Rights’ would be intended to coerce through federal intervention. But it must be understood that there is a real cost to ‘doing the right thing’. Having extra ground crew personnel standing by to service stranded aircraft, renting or owning extra terminal gates at which to park unexpected aircraft, having extra flight crew members standing by at the airport to cover operational contingencies, carrying extra food and fuel on board aircraft; all of these things cost real money – the real money passengers don’t pay when they focus their fare search on the lowest fare. So when the air carrier is left holding the bill for the passengers’ after-the-fact demands, this coerced entitlement will have to be paid for somehow. Expect higher fares.
Now let’s get to the core problem here.
For the most part, the carrier, their employees, and their passengers are simply the collective victims of a dysfunctional ATC system. The meltdown which is illustrated by DL510 points to three systemic consequences of government operated ATC.
No single person at the federal level is ever held accountable for breakdowns such as the one documented in this article.
The centralized control of aviation infrastructure is incapable of handling situations such as this in a time-efficient manner.
All of the best stand-alone practices and all of the hard working individuals at the FAA can not fix the problem, because unfortunately, federal bureaucracy IS the problem.
Take a tour of the FAA command center outside of Washington D.C. and you will be shown the state of the art facility which 'maintains' the commercial integrity of the national air space. How did that work out for the folks on DL510? Ask the FAA about the Attila program which manages timed arrivals into Atlanta Hartsfield Int'l and you'll be told how efficient it is. You’ll even be shown the numbers to prove it. Obviously, this is only true in good weather.
And so it seems apparent that no centralized federal program, or federal facility, can act effectively on the sheer enormity of incidents which occur during irregular aviation operations. Neither can they execute the minutia of each single contingency. For that to occur systemically, ATC must be de-centralized. In fact, it must be privatized. This would provide accountability AND a market incentive to act efficiently and effectively during irregular operations. For more information on the free-market provision and consumption of aviation infrastructure, visit the Velocity 1 LLC blog at http://velocity1llc.wordpress.com.
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