The October tarmac delay numbers have just been released by the Transportation Department, and there’s good news: No one had to wait on a parked plane for more than four hours.
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TARMAC
That’s a question worth asking after the Secretary of Transportation posted a response to a column I wrote about tarmac delays.
Unlike some of my esteemed travel writing colleagues, I won’t make the mistake of confusing a few tarmac delay activists with the entire passenger rights movement. Still, the August airline performance numbers, which have just been released by our friends at the Department of Transportation, merit a closer look.
Almost seven hours on the tarmac? Have these people lost their minds?
This is an interesting twist. Remember the Continental/ExpressJet tarmac incident earlier this month? Everyone was quick to blame the airline for holding passengers overnight against their will. Now, a preliminary investigation by the Transportation Department has found that Mesaba, a regional carrier owned by Delta Air Lines, was the likely culprit.
Another day, another tarmac delay.
Oh no, they’ve done it again.
Passengers on ExpressJet Airlines flight 2816 from Houston to Minneapolis spent the night trapped inside a small airplane parked at the Rochester, Minn., airport, “complete with crying babies and the aroma of over-used toilets,” according to reports.
As the airline industry toasts its latest on-time arrival record — 79.1 percent of flights in April arrived on schedule, up just a fraction from the previous month and about one percentage point higher than a year ago — no one seems to be paying much attention to the price we pay for this improvement.
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