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Display name:
Greg Bockelman
This pretty much sums it up.
Top Five Reasons A Congressional Passenger Bill of Rights
Would Be A Dishonest Sham
It's taken on a Crusade-like atmosphere.
The evil airline industry must be tamed, punished, and shown the will of the people. Those that disagree or who dare question the Crusade are infidels, who incur righteous anger from those who have joined the Great Cause.
"You are anti-consumer!" a few outraged, if mentally-unburdened, radio talk show hosts have blurted out when views alternative to the Doctrine of the Crusade are mentioned. Editorial Boards across the nation have joined the movement, demanding that "something" be done about the on-going nightmare of airlines trapping passengers on airplanes for hours. To read some of the tomes coming out of the print media, one might conclude that an airline ticket is immediate entry to a winged Gitmo.
The Righteous Din Is Really An Uneducated Mob. Now for something that a few folks in the media, and it seems just about everybody in the consumerist world, want to ignore. It's called reality.
The top five reasons that a Congressional passenger rights bill would be a dishonest sham:
Reason # 5: What happened at JFK with jetBlue on February 14th was not necessarily completely avoidable, as congressional-panderers maintain. jetBlue launched flights that subsequently could not take off due to weather, and could not be safely deplaned due to that weather. A Congressional mandate as proposed won't change this in the future. Those that blindly maintain that "there's always a set of stairs" or "get a bus" some other lame-brained comment have never seen the complexity of running a ramp operation. If the plane is a half a mile from the terminal, trapped by sudden ice for example, those options don't exist.
To be sure, for aircraft close to the terminal, a better job might have been done, and it will be done by jetBlue in the future. They don't need the sudden blowfish outrage of Sen. Barbara Boxer to fix it.
Reason # 4: These are NOT common occurrences. As noted last week, do a news search to find any major such events since 1999. True, the American flight at Austin on Dec 29 was apparently a case study in screw-up, but despite the dishonest implications by some self-appointed protectors of the consumer, it was not an epidemic across the nation. It was one flight out of thousands operated by AA, and NOT an indication of a systemic failure.
And, please, for the media out there that bring up the 1999 incident in Detroit, note that that was eight years ago, and there was a major one-off and fast-moving snowstorm that simply overwhelmed the airport and the airlines. Glance at the calendar - enough time has passed since then to experience two Presidential campaigns, a war in Iraq, and to gestate three generations of Indian elephants. It cannot be used as a dot on the continuum of airline consumer outrages.
Reason # 3: Simply mandating that passengers have the right to get off an airplane in three hours (or whatever other arbitrary time) does not concurrently provide the means to do so. What Senator Boxer and her no-need-to-check-reality buddies don't understand is that there may not be facilities or equipment or the ability to get people off airplanes, get food, and other things they may congressionally-mandate. And in some cases, it may be really bad customer service to do so.
See, passengers can find themselves on an airplane for hours, and not be at the same airport they departed from.
When Denver's all-weather airport shuts down due to weather, sometimes a dozen or more flights can get diverted to Colorado Springs. All gates may be already occupied. Some of the carriers may not have staff at that airport. Furthermore, there may not be the ability to off-load passengers safely due to the volume of aircraft at the diversion airport - or to get them back on the plane again. Then it may be the case that there are no sterile areas available to off-load passengers, which could mean once they're off, they stay off, particularly if there is no TSA staff on duty.
The point is that the "problem" of folks stuck on airplanes is not one that congress can wave a wand and fix, nor is is a one-solution fits all, nor is is one that is endemic to the airline industry.
Reason #2: These situations, particularly the jetBlue 14 February event, are UNIQUE. That day the weather appeared to allow operations, but turned nasty unexpectedly, trapping airplanes on the ramp at JFK. To paint this as a systematic industry-wide problem that the airlines are not addressing is simply dishonest.
Reason #1: Airline consumers do deserve better. And that means they do not deserve the thousands of hours of delays encountered every year because the FAA's air traffic control system has been incompetently managed over the last 20 years. Unlike the jetBlue incident, flights are routinely trapped on ramps, diverted, or cancelled simply because the ATC system upgrades needed to handle the nation's air transportation system have been negligently mis-managed by the FAA. If Barbara Boxer and some consumer vigilantes really cared about passengers, it's the ATC system they'd focus on, instead of playing cowardly soapbox politics.
Going forward, we'll be hearing more on how Congress must save consumers from the evil clutches of the airline industry. The airport industry best not conclude that they're going to be immune from this stupidity, either. It's not above these oh-so-outraged Senators from demanding that airports have the facilities ready and in place to handle such situations. Stairs. Ramps. Jetways. Food concessions open and ready. Whatever fantasy Congress can dream up to look like stars. And moral cowards.
What these incidents have illuminated is not how bad the airline industry is, but instead how shallow and unconcerned Congress is.
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