As experienced travelers well know, no matter how inexpensive cheap airplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, or cheap vacation packages are, no price is cheap enough to offset the frustration passengers feel when stranded on a plane on a runway in excess of three hours with no knowledge of when they might be let off the plane.
In late April of last year, the Department of Transportation (DOT) instituted new rules and fines for airlines that stranded domestic passengers on planes sitting on tarmacs for over three hours. At the time, the airlines predicted doom and gloom. They claimed that these new rules would dramatically drive up flight cancellations and would be bad for both airlines and passengers.
The good news for passengers is that extended runway delays are down 98 percent since the new rules have been put in place. The good news for the airlines is the DOT has yet to level any penalties in any of the dozen violations since May of 2010.
The DOT could fine the offending airlines millions of dollars for each incident, but to this point violations have resulted in nothing more than a few warning letters admitted the DOT. The DOT claims that select violations since May are still being investigated.
The reasons DOT has given for not issuing any fines to date are:
Some incidents were exempted by the runway delay rules for safety, security or air traffic control operations reasons.
In other cases, the runway delays were only a few minutes over the three-hour rule, and the DOT determined that the airline had worked to comply with the rule.
To date the threat of fines is clearly motivating the airlines to do everything within their power, not to leave planes sitting on runways for extended periods of time. Looks like both passengers and airlines are winning.
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