American Eagle was fined for keeping 608 passengers on planes for more than three hours.
Airlines are warned: no
lengthy delays this winter.
The Department of Transportation issued a
stern message to the airlines on Monday, when it fined the regional unit of
American Airlines, American Eagle, $900,000 for keeping 608 passengers on board
15 different flights for more than three hours at Chicago O’Hare International
Airport in May.
The fine was the first since the government
imposed a limit on tarmac delays in April 2010 after a series of incidents
stranded passengers onboard planes for 10 hours or more. The government now
requires carriers to allow passengers to get off planes if they are stuck on
board for more than three hours.
The department said the penalty was the
largest ever paid by an airline in a consumer protection case not involving
civil rights violations.
Still, the fine fell short of the maximum
penalty that it could have imposed — $16.7 million, or $27,500 for each of the
608 passengers stranded that day.
Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation,
said the fine was intended as a signal to other airlines.
“We wanted to make sure the penalty was
sufficient enough to send a message to other airlines that our first
enforcement sets a precedent, and that these are serious matters,” Mr. LaHood
said in an interview.
The fine was the second federal action in
recent days related to tarmac delays. On Friday, the Federal Aviation
Administration said that it would bring airlines, airports and air traffic
controllers together at the end of this month to find ways to get better information
to airlines when bad weather forces them to divert flights to smaller airports
that do not always have sufficient manpower and equipment. A lack of
communication was blamed in the stranding of hundreds of passengers at Bradley International Airport Hartford
The tarmac delay rule was prompted by a series
of incidents in which passengers complained of being stranded on airplanes for
hours with no chance of getting off, often with little food or water, and in
some cases without functioning bathrooms.
The airlines had fought the rule, arguing that
it would lead to more canceled flights and seriously complicate their efforts
to operate in bad weather. One executive, Jeffrey A. Smisek, then the head of Continental
Airlines, said the rule was “stupid” and would make things worse for
passengers. Airlines now claim they are more likely to cancel a flight than
risk a fine.
That assertion was backed up by a report in
September by the Government Accountability Office, which found that flights
were three times more likely to be canceled if they stayed on the tarmac two to
three hours.
“As our analysis has shown, the rule appears
to be associated with an increased number of cancellations for thousands of
additional passengers — far more than D.O.T. initially predicted — including
some who might not have experienced a tarmac delay,” the government agency said in its report.
There is no question the rule has radically
reduced the number of lengthy tarmac delays.
From May 2010 to April 2011, the first year
after the three-hour rule went into effect, there were just 20 occurrences of
more than three hours, and none exceeded four hours. Although there have been
dozens more since, that is still down from 693 occurrences in the 12 months
before the rule went into effect. In 105 of those cases, the delays were longer
than four hours, according to the Transportation Department.
The rule, which originally applied only to
domestic flights, was extended to international flights in August, but with a
four-hour limit.
The department’s enforcement office continues
to investigate 15 to 20 flight delays in recent months in excess of three
hours. In most cases, investigators have found that some exception to the rule
applied — either because bad weather, like thunderstorms, prohibited passengers
from getting off the plane safely or because delays were attributable to
directions from air traffic control.
In the case of American Eagle, however,
investigators found that the airline had been solely responsible for the
delays, even if the length of the delays was not among the most egregious.
Two of the American Eagle flights exceeded the
three-hour limit by just three minutes. More than half the flights violated the
limit by less than 15 minutes. The longest delay, involving a flight arriving
from El Paso
The investigators said that American Eagle
continued to land flights at O’Hare on May 29, the day before Memorial Day,
even though some flights were not able to leave the airport because of fog and
bad weather conditions. As a result, some arriving flights had no gate to park
at once they landed.
American Eagle’s operations center issued a
ground stop for all arrivals into O’Hare at around 3:50
to 4 p.m. that day. “However, by 4 p.m., a gridlock situation had already
begun to develop at the American Eagle ramp, and each hour thereafter the
situation got progressively worse in terms of arrivals exceeding departures,”
according to the Department of Transportation consent
order.
The problems were aggravated by the airline’s
on-duty tower manager who “continued to believe that the delay situation was
still manageable,” as late as 8:05 p.m. , the department said.
The airline’s program to allow passengers to get off the plane was finally
initiated at 8:30 p.m. and it cleared two
gates. By then, 15 flights had been on the tarmac for more than three hours.
“We take our responsibility to comply with all
of the department’s requirements very seriously and have already put in place
processes to avoid such an occurrence in the future,” Daniel P. Garton,
American Eagle’s chief executive, said in a statement. American Eagle is owned
by the AMR Corporation, the parent company of American Airlines, which is in
the process of spinning off the regional carrier into a separate company.
American Eagle has already paid $150,000 in
compensation to its passengers, or an average of $250 a person. It agreed to
settle the matter to avoid litigation.
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