Fliers Trapped On Tarmac Have Little Recourse

After sitting on the tarmac for five hours waiting to take off, the passengers on Independence Air Flight 1128 felt anything but independent.

The flight was supposed to take off from Boston's Logan International Airport at 1:15 p.m. Wednesday. But because of yet another harsh stream of thunderstorms blowing into the Washington area, Dulles International Airport was not accepting incoming flights.

So the passengers sat on the 50-seat plane on the tarmac with little air conditioning for nearly four hours. The aircraft finally returned to the gate at 5 p.m. Twenty-five minutes later, passengers were ordered to quickly get back on board. The plane made its way down the runway, only to sit again, for another hour.

The plane finally took off from Boston at 6:40 p.m. and arrived at Dulles at 8:50, nearly eight hours after scheduled departure. It was just about the same amount of time it would have taken the passengers to drive.

"We felt a little captive on there and people were getting angrier and angrier each moment," said passenger Maryanne Hellender of Potomac. "If we had been on there any longer, it would have been mutiny on Independence Airlines."

This sort of captivity was supposed to end after a couple of incidents several years ago -- in which Northwest Airlines and United Airlines trapped passengers on grounded planes for eight hours -- prompted all of the major airlines, under threat of legislation from Congress, to adopt so-called passenger bills of rights. Those rules spelled out how they would inform customers of delayed or canceled flights and how they would treat them during "extended" waits for departure.

In his 2001 report to Congress on airline customer service, Department of Transportation inspector general Kenneth Mead said the airlines should clarify what they meant by an "extended" period so that "passengers will know what they can expect."

"Airlines differ in what qualifies as 'extended,' " Mead said at the time. "The trigger thresholds for this provision vary from 45 minutes to three hours. We think it is unlikely that a passenger's definition of an 'extended' on-aircraft delay will vary depending upon which air carrier they are flying."

Just three months after Mead's testimony, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred, forcing the airlines to focus on other issues and leaving those vagaries undefined.

But Independence passenger Hellender said that the airlines should be forced to revisit the issue.