Good rule will protect air passengers (Dec. 22)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Good news for those who fly: The Obama administration has issued a rule limiting to three hours the amount of time airlines may keep passengers cooped up on the ground.
This past year, the horror stories abounded of airlines which kept people locked inside of planes on taxiways for up to six hours and even more.
Under the new rule, airlines can be charged as much as $27,500 per passenger for refusing to let passengers deplane after three hours.
You would think that the airlines, once they determined a plane could not take off for whatever reason, would taxi the plane into a safe area and let the passengers off who wanted to get off.
What about the baggage? Well, it would go on to the destination, as would the passengers, eventually.
That just seems like normal good business.
Apparently not to airlines, which purposefully schedule too many flights, knowing they can get away with inconveniencing passengers — for a while, at any rate.
I’ve never been stranded like that. The most I’ve had to sit in a plane after it rolled away from the terminal was 30 minutes or so. As long as the air conditioning is on, that’s all right. You can always look out the window, read a book or a magazine or even snooze.
But in at least one case, the passengers were kept locked up 11 hours. When you read about service like that, it makes you not want to fly again.
Some of these strandings are unavoidable. Weather, mechanical problems and other unexpected difficulties can delay a flight. But the new rules will require the airlines to let people off their planes and go back into the terminals while those problems are solved or waited out.
That only makes sense.
