Delayed Pax Again.

I think there needs to be a passenger bill of rights. I can't for the
life of me see how they can just legally lock you up in an airplane
and hold you there. They should be required to get busses or
whatever out there and get the passengers off. I'm sure the
airlines have 20 excuses why that won't work .. but I'm not buying
it. There should be a steep financial penalty .. like $10k paid to
each passenger .. for failure to comply.

RT
 
RogerT said:
I think there needs to be a passenger bill of rights. I can't for the
life of me see how they can just legally lock you up in an airplane
and hold you there. They should be required to get busses or
whatever out there and get the passengers off. I'm sure the
airlines have 20 excuses why that won't work .. but I'm not buying
it. There should be a steep financial penalty .. like $10k paid to
each passenger .. for failure to comply.

RT
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Only if the PBOR is well crafted. If it contains blanket exemptions for mechanical problems (or ATC/weather delays), the airlines will do what they do now: delay flights and use one of the exempted excuses.

I see this as well meaning (and frankly I'd like to see it), but by the time it gets done, I expect the lobbyist to make it toothless.
 
My father in law was supposed to leave BOS at 3:45 yesterday. Jet Blue held them in the terminal until 11:30, when they called in the MSP to escort passengers from the terminal. They advised them of a "new" departure time 9 times during this whole experience.

Now, he is delayed until Sunday... and staying with us for the weekend.

I understand the thought process (Let's get these people on their way as fast as possible!), but the end result is failed promises and unrealistic expectations, which isn't a good customer service experience.

I'll be honest with you - if I was a senior executive at an airline, I would demand an operational, real time dashboard on my mobile devices and my PC that showed the status of each flight - Delayed (at gate), Delayed (pax on board, at gate), Delayed (pax on board, on airport surface), Delayed (in air, spacing), Delayed (in air, holding), On-time, and Cancelled. Or something like that. That way, senior executives could act quickly - 8 hours on the tarmac? That should have been picked up 4 hours earlier, IMO.

Cheers,

-Andrew
 
I understand there are suddenly a number of bills introduced to require airlines to release passengers after 3 hours waiting on the tarmac.

The biggest problem they have is that Joe Scarborough was one of the passengers who was stuck for more than 8 hours. I didn't have the patience to listen through his description on national cable last night, but I noticed all the other cable channel news picked up on the story.
 
How about a simple FAA mandate that any available gate be allowed for use by any aircraft with passengers who have been stranded onboard for more than two hours? I think that's plenty long.

I was listening to JFK tower the other day. Normally, it's departing flights with long waits and needing to shut down for an hour or more before departure. Instead, departures were wheels up pretty fast. At one point, the controller was jokingly apologetic to the pilot for it taking eleven minutes to taxi out for departure.

Arriving aircraft were having to shut down for extended periods. At times, they would start up to be moved out of the way for others behind them, repositioned and shut down again.
 
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I have been down at Pensacola NAS for some training these past couple of days. Half of our class were guys coming in from NY and they did not make it in. That was nice for us because we got more time to play with the toys but sad for them. Several of them got stuck at the airport with continuing promises to get out on the next flight but of course that 'next' flight never materialized.
 
Not much will be done until some poor soul dies of a heart attack or something while held hostage. If any other industry in the universe treated their customers like that, they'd be sued into oblivion.

Here's a business idea someone can run with. Create a fleet of ground vehicles that's always ready to drive up to the planes and "rescue" the passengers. They make buses that elevate on scissor lifts for airports. Just bus them to the terminal like Comair does. How hard is that?
 
JohnR said:
Create a fleet of ground vehicles that's always ready to drive up to the planes and "rescue" the passengers. They make buses that elevate on scissor lifts for airports. Just bus them to the terminal like Comair does. How hard is that?
Click to expand...

But, the buses will be used what, 1-2 times a year, maybe? No ROI on that...
 
Bill Jennings said:
But, the buses will be used what, 1-2 times a year, maybe? No ROI on that...
Click to expand...

I don't know why they cannot just push stair up to the plane and let the people down or move one of the empty planes off of a gate for them. I mean, is this really so hard to figure out?
 
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Maybe we're thinking like non-pilots. People sometimes ask me, "If something goes wrong, can't you just use your parachute?" Like it's so obvious.

What are we missing about this airline passenger/hostage situation?
 
Nortwest did this a few years back, 8 hrs on the tarmac, overflowing toilets, no food. I believe some brought suit for wrongful imprisonment. I think that's where the "passenger bill of rights" came from, a deflection of laws against that kind of inhumane treatment.
 
smigaldi said:
I don't know why they cannot jsut push stair up tot he plane and let the people down or move one the empty planes off of a gate sor them. I mean, is this really so hard to figure out?
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No doubt some of the problem is likely "security" regulations that cannot be violated (and should be modified). I suspect there's also concerns about the risk of injury climbing down the stairs and walking among the airplanes to the terminal, especially if the wx is poor, but I'd think there would be ways to deal with that.

IIRC, when a bunch of planes were diverted somewhere in the SW (Austin, TX?) last year, the airport didn't have any "stairs" high enough to reach the larger planes that didn't normally land there. Seems like a little planning would prevent that kind of SNAFU.
 
astanley said:
My father in law was supposed to leave BOS at 3:45 yesterday. Jet Blue held them in the terminal until 11:30, when they called in the MSP to escort passengers from the terminal. They advised them of a "new" departure time 9 times during this whole experience.

Now, he is delayed until Sunday... and staying with us for the weekend.

I understand the thought process (Let's get these people on their way as fast as possible!), but the end result is failed promises and unrealistic expectations, which isn't a good customer service experience.

I'll be honest with you - if I was a senior executive at an airline, I would demand an operational, real time dashboard on my mobile devices and my PC that showed the status of each flight - Delayed (at gate), Delayed (pax on board, at gate), Delayed (pax on board, on airport surface), Delayed (in air, spacing), Delayed (in air, holding), On-time, and Cancelled. Or something like that. That way, senior executives could act quickly - 8 hours on the tarmac? That should have been picked up 4 hours earlier, IMO.

Cheers,

-Andrew
Click to expand...

I understand the frustration of the multiple delay then cancel game, but that still a far cry from the inconvenience and discomfort of being held hostage inside a plane with no toilets, food, or even drinkable water. There's really no valid excuse for that IMO.

I'm surprised (well not really that surprised given the displayed ineptitude of most airline management) that some airline hasn't taken the initiative on this and touted their own PBoR backed by a plan to prevent the hostage taking and a stated financial penalty to be paid if they fail. Seems to me that might attract more customers than a $10 drop in fare price.
 
lancefisher said:
I understand the frustration of the multiple delay then cancel game, but that still a far cry from the inconvenience and discomfort of being held hostage inside a plane with no toilets, food, or even drinkable water. There's really no valid excuse for that IMO.

I'm surprised (well not really that surprised given the displayed ineptitude of most airline management) that some airline hasn't taken the initiative on this and touted their own PBoR backed by a plan to prevent the hostage taking and a stated financial penalty to be paid if they fail. Seems to me that might attract more customers than a $10 drop in fare price.
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I think airline execs, in general, are focused on revenue and the bottom line. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is labor. In no other industry (except men trying to get jobs in porno) do educated and talented individuals debase themselves to get jobs that pay less than minimum wage and then spend their careers hating management. It's a cluster-f the whole way around.

I'm also convinced that the airlines are where MBA flunkies go to breed, but that is another ball of wax.

Cheers,

-Andrew
 
The last time this happened, they let people walk their dogs on the ramp. That tells me they were able to get off the plane....
 
astanley said:
I think airline execs, in general, are focused on revenue and the bottom line.
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And the fact is, if you're an exec at a publicly traded company, that's what you're required to be focused on by law, and you can and will be sued if you are perceived to be doing otherwise.

Of course, in this case, one could argue that that poor decision diminished shareholder value because of the bad publicity...
 
Inmates at Guantanamo are treated better than passengers on these planes.
 
TMetzinger said:
And the fact is, if you're an exec at a publicly traded company, that's what you're required to be focused on by law, and you can and will be sued if you are perceived to be doing otherwise.
Click to expand...

It's very shortsighted to say that doing something a little different may not pay of way better in the long run. Saying that an airline exec focusing on service will be sued is ludicrous. With good service will come customer loyalty. Getting a customer for a lifetime instead of a few hour trip is a hell of a lot better of a business objective. The short term investors may not like this but if that's the case they can go elsewhere. There are many public companies that base their business on service and loyalty.
 
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Jesse,

An airline exec who focuses on service to the extent his airline loses money and stock price goes down will get sued by somebody. Same goes for any public company where the execs don't own most of the stock. The suits aren't always successful, but they are always a pain in the butt.

Yes, it's ludicrous. What's your point? As you age you'll find that an awful lot of the world is just creaking along in a very stupid way. The key is knowing what is worthy of attention.

As an example, think back to the BritAir 747 deciding to cross the Atlantic on three after experiencing a failure over the US.
 
TMetzinger said:
And the fact is, if you're an exec at a publicly traded company, that's what you're required to be focused on by law, and you can and will be sued if you are perceived to be doing otherwise.

Of course, in this case, one could argue that that poor decision diminished shareholder value because of the bad publicity...
Click to expand...

OK - I apologize for not being perfectly clear. Let me rewrite:

"focused on the bottom line at the extreme expense of customer safety and satisfaction"

I think that airline executives are so far out of touch with reality, along with their labor unions, that the whole ship is a sinking mess. My $0.02. I spent a LOT of time with Fortune 50 executives in my prior job, and I never came across people so far out of touch with their customer base as those in the airline sector.

One could make the argument that being publicly traded and being in such a heavily front-line consumer industry can be incompatible, and that the duties to the shareholders could be incongruous with effective customer satisfaction, that's a greased up steep slope that no one wants to go down.

This could also turn into a rant about the frighteningly short-sighted view that many shareholders, or more to the point, analysts and traders, possess, but I just don't have the energy for that one tonight. Not to mention, we could get into tort reform and a extremely litigious society, but I am almost out of bourbon and I don't have quite enough Xanax to come down off of that one..

Cheers,

-Andrew
who is glad to be working at a privately held company now
 
I can only add to Andrew's excellent comments.

By virtue of the FAA (or more broadly, regulation and airspace constraints), there are significant barriers to entry to competitors in the business. Airline management knows this, and they use that as justification for NOT providing or having to provide customer service. Or as one airline sales and marketing (S&M?) executive said to me as I was negotiation a corporate deal: "You have to fly on us [between these markets], and therefore we will not offer you a discount." Now, that wasn't entirely accurate (other airlines offered connecting flights), but in a separate deal, another airline outright refused to consider a corporate deal because (as they said) we had a divisional corporate office in Cincinnati - despite my willingness to give them ALL of our shuttle business.

Just like the railroad owners saw themselves in the "train business" and ignored the customers, the airlines do the same thing.

Wanna know why DL is engaged in one of the largest international expansions of any carrier? Because the markets are less competitive than the US. Barriers to entry.

And the corollary is the precise reason that Southwest and JetBlue (at least before this week's meltdown) have done well is that they broke the old model. There were no fancy services, and no worldwide coverage. No customer battling for upgrades to overpriced seats, capped fares (no $1500 coach fares), and efficient operations.

This is also the reason that the airlines really want control of ATC and high user fees on GA. They have lost the premium passenger to GA/corporate jets, and they want to make the barriers to corporate/private jets much higher so they can maintain the high fares they shove on last-minute business passengers. They'd rather erect barriers than to make the service changes necessary to attract new customers.

You may not know, but a couple of the airlines have now started selling non-changable fares in some markets. Not "non-refundable", but non-changable. Meaning: if something comes up, or you miss a flight, tough luck. Yet despite the fee-for-change, non-refund policies on many tickets, the airlines feel free to make changes at their whim that inconvenience passengers. No penalty to the airlines.

This is why I'm coming to think that a bill-of-rights may well get passed. It would, IMHO, impose maximum limits on on-board waiting time, it would limit the sale of non-changable tickets, it would increase denied-boarding compensation and would mandate some kind of penalty for excessively late flights.

The only way to stop the race to the bottom is to impose some form of regulation. I hope it doesn't take the death of passengers to bring this about, but given the way regulations are developed, it may take that....
 
While I don't in any way defend the airlines, I would be leery of huge penalties for delays because I don't want my pilots to feel pressured to takeoff with unsafe mechanical conditions or into questionable weather, and I don't want ATC pressured to sequence airplanes more closely when the conditions are bad. The fact is, while the airlines might abuse these excuses, there are times when they are real. For the same reason, GA user fees are an anathema to safety, as GA pilots will be more willing to launch into questionable conditions w/o ATC help and will therefore get into trouble more often.

I guess I would rather see abusive misuse of the excuses for delays than compromises to pax safety.

Judy
 
JohnR said:
Here's a business idea someone can run with. Create a fleet of ground vehicles that's always ready to drive up to the planes and "rescue" the passengers. They make buses that elevate on scissor lifts for airports. Just bus them to the terminal like Comair does. How hard is that?
Click to expand...

Looks like even THAT isn't the safest alternative:

http://www.kcci.com/news/11052490/detail.html
 
TMetzinger said:
Jesse,

An airline exec who focuses on service to the extent his airline loses money and stock price goes down will get sued by somebody. Same goes for any public company where the execs don't own most of the stock. The suits aren't always successful, but they are always a pain in the butt.

Yes, it's ludicrous. What's your point? As you age you'll find that an awful lot of the world is just creaking along in a very stupid way. The key is knowing what is worthy of attention.

As an example, think back to the BritAir 747 deciding to cross the Atlantic on three after experiencing a failure over the US.
Click to expand...

I think I know how the world works. Nor do I think I'm sheltered from the reality of the world or ever have been. You can either sit and play with the rules of this world and remain one of the majority or you can step outside some of these rules and either fail miserably or be a major success. Some people like the safety of the majority while others like the benefits and rewards of not following all these rules. Most will fail--some will succeed. Those that succeed write the new rules.

What's your point about the 747? There was nothing wrong with that in my opinion. There is a reason they strap four engines on the jet. As a passenger would I rather fly around in circles for hours over LAX so we could get to landing weight, land and probably trash the tires, followed by all kinds of other bull**** that would follow at LAX. Or would I rather just get on our way and trust the crew knows what they are doing? I'd much rather take the second.
 
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jesse said:
I think I know how the world works. Nor do I think I'm sheltered from the reality of the world or ever have been. You can either sit and play with the rules of this world and remain one of the majority or you can step outside some of these rules and either fail miserably or be a major success. Some people like the safety of the majority while others like the benefits and rewards of not following all these rules. Most will fail--some will succeed. Those that succeed write the new rules.
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And some would say JetBlue is one of those trying to write the new rules.

It's easy for any of us to say after the fact that no passengers should be stuck for 8 hours w/o food and water, that this is not good customer service. I would argue that this event isn't necessarily a case of CEO rectal-cranial inversion, but an example of how difficult it is to schedule an airline. It takes some real PhD-level mathematics and supercomputing power to even sub-optimally schedule ~120 aircraft, crew, etc. all while conforming to FAA regulations and still make a profit. Under normal circumstances, that scheduling program provides what is considered good customer service. Throw a kink into it, though, and it all goes to hell pretty quickly.

JetBlue might be pressed against the limit moreso than others, as I found this (older) link to an article that shows them #1 in aircraft utilization hours.

-Rich


P.S. Saw a nice article here (NYTimes) about Toyota. Makes an interesting discussion for short-term vs. long-term thinking.
 
judypilot said:
I guess I would rather see abusive misuse of the excuses for delays than compromises to pax safety.

Judy
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Judy, I don't disagree. There are currently exemptions for weather. And I've seen cases where airlines have cut corners on maintenance - even under the current system.

I believe that there needs to be a financial incentive for airlines to do proper maintenance. And I believe that the compensation needs to go to those inconvenienced.

Here's an example: I boarded an AA flight from DFW to DCA a couple of weeks ago - jam-packed 737 (seats about 150 passengers). The pilot delayed departure for 45+ minutes, and an additional 20+ minutes at the arrival end - the late arrival meant the gate was used by another aircraft - because the maintenance crew that returned the plane to service before our flight failed to check/properly inflate the tires. There is really no excuse for that. AA got a free pass - no compensation to passengers of any kind - and the passengers got *******.

While I agree that there should not be an incentive to fly with bad equipment, I believe that there needs to be a financial incentive to do their jobs right, the first time.

Friday night - a clear evening at DFW - I counted 62 delayed flights out of 105 shown on the screen. That isn't weather....
 
TMetzinger said:
An airline exec who focuses on service to the extent his airline loses money and stock price goes down will get sued by somebody.
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so they could do it the way they are doing now, and lose money and lower stock prices. or they could provide good service and loose money and lower stock prices.
 
Greg Bockelman said:
Not in Dallas, maybe. But those planes have to COME from SOMEWHERE.
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Understood, Greg... they were coming from all over. Really. And the weather from east coast to DFW was good (I came in from DC).

The airline industry is not free-market. Standard free-market solutions don't apply.
 
Here's a good one. My sister and brother-in-law are in Dallas for a connecting American flight to LA. They sat in the plane for about an hour waiting for the winds to die down. The pilot announced "After the Jet-Blue thing we don't want you waiting in the plane for hours so we'll let you wait in the terminal"

Much better food, drinking water and toilets that can handle the capacity.

Current Metar:

[FONT=Monospace,Courier]KDFW 241853Z 25035G45KT 10SM FEW100 21/M11 A2953 RMK AO2 PK WND 26045/1852 SLP993 T02111106

Good job AA!

Joe
[/FONT]
 
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