Cheap airplane tickets or cheap vacation packages cannot be cheap enough to mitigate the frustration felt when passengers are stranded on runways for lengthy periods of time. Passengers on a Virgin Atlantic flight last week traveling between Heathrow Airport, near London, to Newark were diverted by bad weather to Bradley International Airport, near Hartford. They then sat on the runway for over four hours in stifling heat on a plane whose ground air conditioner was not working.
The problem with getting the passengers off the plane at the Bradley airport was caused due to a small staff of customs and immigration inspectors who had already gone home that evening, making it impossible to process international arrivals until the airport could recall some of its customs staff.
In April the Transportation Department announced a new tarmac rule that provides penalties of up to $27,500 per passenger for airlines that strand passengers on planes for three hours or more. Currently the rule only covers domestic flights and domestic airlines.
The Transportation Department has proposed additional rules that would include foreign airlines landing in the U.S. as well as expand requirements for airports to have contingency plans for dealing with extended runway delays. If adopted, the proposed rules will not go into effect until the fall at the earliest.
The new rule covering extended runway delays on domestic flights appears to be working as intended. In April of 09 there were 81 incidents where passengers were stranded in excess of three hours; in April of 08 there were 150; whereas in April of this year there were only four such incidents.
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