It’s not your imagination. Congress seems to be paying closer attention to travelers’ welfare.
TARMAC
The Halloween weekend stranding of more than 1,000 airline passengers at Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn., brought the tarmac delay activists out in full force again, pushing for new laws that they claim would prevent lengthy ground delays.
From the “gotcha” fees that can double the price of your trip to being roughed up by airport screeners, there’s no shortage of issues to get mad about in the travel business.
Tarmac-delay rule gives air travelers more respect
A new study by a team of aviation consultants which claims the government’s new tarmac delay rule will cost the flying public $3.9 billion during the next two decades, is making waves in the aviation industry and beyond.
Attention, airlines: The government wants to know more about your tarmac delays.
There may be reason why the first order of business in the Transportation Department’s new rulemaking on passenger rights addresses the problem of tarmac delays. These rare but completely needless ground delays have been a political hotbutton, leading to previous action by the department that effectively bans airlines from keeping passengers parked on a taxiway for more than three hours.
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.
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.
Elliott is consumer advocate 
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