As the airline industry remains opposed to setting a time limit on how long passengers can be held hostage in airliners on the tarmac, an influential industry pioneer backs such a deadline – with strings attached – and industry experts suggest common sense solutions that could nip the controversy in the bud, while avoiding a congressional-imposed three-hour time limit.

The Business Travel Coalition and FlyersRights.org recently co-hosted a Washington, D.C. event at which former American Airlines Chair, President and CEO Robert Crandall spoke out in favor of letting passenger deplane in the face of lengthy ground holds.

Crandall supports a three-hour time limit, but he also warned of consequences.

Crandall broke ranks with industry executives on the controversial matter, supporting legislation in the U.S. Senate that would mandate that passengers be allowed to get off the plane after a three-hour wait. Exceptions: If the pilot thinks it's unsafe to leave the plane or that the plane will take off in 30 minutes.

"The airline industry should have led the way in responding to this problem rather than having resisted it," Crandall said. "Every responsible airline executive I know thinks these things are an outrage."

He said there might be a downside. Returning passengers to airport waiting areas could likely result in flight cancellations and modest fare increases. With flights operating at near capacity, passengers who get off may have trouble getting rebooked. And he recommends an initial four-hour time limit to give airlines time to make adjustments before imposing a three-hour limit in 2011.

The issue has been around for at least a decade with horror stories told and retold. Planeloads of Northwest Airlines passengers were stranded nearly nine hours by a snowstorm in Detroit. JetBlue marooned customers on aircraft for ten hours on Valentine’s Day 2007 at New York’s Kennedy International because of an ice storm.

Forty-seven passengers were left stranded overnight on an airport tarmac in Rochester, MN last Aug. Continental Express Flight 2816, which left Houston at 9:23 p.m. on Aug. 7, didn’t arrive in Minneapolis, MN until after 11 a.m. the next day.

Between Point A and Point B, the 50-seat ERJ-145 operated for Continental by ExpressJet, spent nearly seven hours sitting on a runway in Rochester, where it had been diverted because of thunderstorms. The flight crew, 49 passengers and two lap-held babies aboard the cramped aircraft had nothing to eat and were forced to endure odor from a toilet. They were finally allowed to go inside the airport terminal at 6 a.m. About three hours later, the passengers re-boarded the plane and flew to Minneapolis.

Airline officials said the passengers had to stay on the aircraft because they could not be safely deplaned and all Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel had left for the night. But airport officials said the passengers could have easily been deplaned and kept (in relative comfort) in a secure area of the airport terminal built to accommodate 500 people.

There has been no comprehensive industry effort to fix the problem. A government task force report last year, which recommended that airlines and airports develop contingency plans, sparked little action. The Air Transport Association says lengthy tarmac delays are "unacceptable and contrary to carrier contingency plans," but maintains that, in general, mandatory, inflexible limits set by Congress "will ultimately end up inconveniencing passengers rather than helping them.”

George Doughty, who manages Lehigh Valley International Airport (ABE), doesn’t understand what the fuss is all about.

Because of its location, 50 miles north of Philadelphia, PA and 80 miles west of Newark, NJ, ABE serves as an alternate for flights destined for Philadelphia International and the New York area airports. “Continental uses ABE for diversions so frequently that their flight crews simply call us the ‘Allentown gas station’,” he told event attendees.

In certain weather conditions – especially during the summer thunderstorm season – in aircraft can be held at ABE for some time.

On July 29th, an unusual thunderstorm pattern developed just south of Newark causing storms to form and then move northeast over the New York region. The airlines began seeing diversions in the early afternoon, and by about 4:00 p.m. ABE had fifteen diverted aircraft on the ground ranging in size from a fifty seat regional jet to a 757.

As the day progressed, Doughty realized that he had aircraft parked at remote location for nearly three hours. They had been put in a queue for departure in anticipation of a lifting of the ground stop. That did not happen. “We made gates available for these aircraft and passengers were deplaned. Passengers re-boarded about an hour later and flights continued to Newark International by mid-evening,” he said.

The experience prompted contingency plan changes at ABE, including improved communication, additional ground equipment and changes in procedures. “Our objective in these situations is to assure passenger needs are met and to give passengers an opportunity to deplane if they have been delayed by more than three hours.

This is consistent with a broad policy to provide the best customer service experience possible. Regardless of the policy of any airline, we will not permit an extended delay of more than three hours without the opportunity to deplane if we can prevent it. Our community would simply not tolerate anything less,” Doughty stated.

He said United Airlines knew how to handle such a problem in Denver in the 1980s. “We may have had passengers stranded in the terminal or hotels, but never on aircraft. United was a master at this process. The fact that they had a bunch of DC-10’s in the domestic system did not hurt either. Unless it was Thanksgiving Eve or the weekend before Christmas, it was a simple task of canceling a Boeing 737 and accommodating nearly everyone on the DC-10 scheduled to leave an hour later,” he said.

Doughty said: “Passengers now know that their flight will not be a memorable experience and will likely be just tolerable. They just hope it will not be awful.”

He said passengers must adhere to numerous rules while on board airliners. “With all of these rules one would think there would be rules relating to our comfort and well-being. There are almost none. No requirements for the number of operating lavatories, amount of potable water or “hydration items”, seat width or seat pitch standards, or even cleanliness of the cabin. It may now be time to strike a better balance,” Doughty believes.

Jim Crites, executive vice president of operations for Dallas/Fort Worth International, said: “whether an emergency is caused by significant adverse weather, or concern regarding a highly contagious disease, there is a recognized need to have all requisite service providers actively partnering to address flight operations and passengers’ needs.

“In reality, it has largely been left to the airlines and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to address all of the issues that arise, but in fact we have learned that there are critical services that can only be provided by the other aviation stakeholders such as airports, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), concessionaires and local commercial ground transportation service providers.”

“All stakeholders need to pre-plan for such events by sharing their existing operational and contingency plans, so as to identify the gaps in providing needed services. It then calls for them to refine and integrate their existing plans to address these gaps. The plan then identifies the need for all service providers to formulate the means for effectively communicating with one another before, during, and after an event to affect what has become known as shared situational awareness,” he added.

The basic idea is to have airports and their associated concessionaires and ground transportation service providers stay open for business, and for TSA and CBP to have staff available to process passengers as the situation warrants.

“The point here is that regardless of whether a specific time is identified for deplaning flights is established or not, the industry needs to have a means of providing effective service to affected flights,” emphasized Crites.

DOT last year issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for enhancing passenger protections by requiring airline contingency plans. While a final rule has not yet been issued, Crites believe that it is important that airline plans include a requirement to coordinate their plans with all airports at which they provide scheduled or charter service. ”Only through such coordination and partnership can plans be developed that address the issues that arise during irregular operations and tarmac delays,” he said.

Dr. Amy Cohn, a University of Michigan professor who has studied the airline industry for nearly two decades, says “the current situation has grown intolerable.

“Without question, many passengers experience extreme discomfort and inconvenience as a result of lengthy tarmac delays. These delays also have a high cost to the airline industry, due to overtime crew pay, excess fuel burn, and so on – costs which are ultimately passed on to passengers. And finally, lengthy queues of aircraft idling while awaiting takeoff have a tremendous negative impact on our environment.”

But she does not believe a three-hour rule will solve the problem. “The U.S. aviation system is tremendously complex, and as in any complex system, even small changes can have wide-spread impact. Therefore, thorough analysis is essential to ensure intended and desirable outcomes, to identify unintended negative side effects, and to determine the optimal trade-off between the two,” she has concluded.

Dr. Cohn said the number of flights incurring more than a three-hour delay is quite small, and during a thunderstorm, it is not safe for ground crews to be on the tarmac to guide a plane to the gate. And in the event of a major snowstorm, there may be no gate to go to. So the number of flights actually returning to the gate as a result of the proposed three-hour rule will be small.

“This is in no way intended to diminish the significance of the experience of those passengers who are on these lengthy delayed flights, no matter how limited they may be in number…Only some of the passengers on these flights will actually have the option to disembark and wait for a future flight. And these passengers will then have to compete with other delayed passengers to get seats on already-near-capacity future flights in the hours or even days after the disruption has cleared,” she reasons.

“So I don’t believe that the three-hour rule will actually change things very much at all, given the few number of affected flights. And when it does, although it will help some passengers, it will also certainly harm others,” Cohn added.

A three-hour rule, she said, “focuses our attention solely on the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. We need to step back and ask: Why are there such substantial tarmac delays in the first place? And what can we do to reduce these delays, rather than focusing on what to do once they have occurred?”

She believes substantial improvements can be made to reduce delays, to improve passenger experiences, to reduce costs, and to help the environment. “There are many promising options to be considered,” she said.

“Any change to the aviation system will have widespread impacts, impacts that must be carefully evaluated and studied to be sure that our actions do not have unintended negative consequences. But I firmly believe that if we take all of the strong emotions and momentum that have swelled around this issue, and channel them into just as powerful analysis and hard work, we can bring about change that truly will benefit the flying public,” Cohn reasons.

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