By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Federal regulators should more aggressively oversee how airlines handle customer-service issues in the wake of growing flight delays and reports of passengers being stranded on tarmacs for hours, a government watchdog reported yesterday.

The recommendation was contained in a lengthy report by Department of Transportation Inspector General Calvin Scovel, who is scheduled to testify today at a House hearing about airline customer service. Scovel's report comes as lawmakers are being pressed to do something about record-setting flight delays and lengthy strandings that passengers endure on the tarmac.

The report, executed at the recommendation of DOT Secretary Mary Peters, noted that the airlines had agreed in 1999 to mitigate strandings and delays, and improve overall customer service at a time the industry was being criticized for poor performance. But those efforts lost steam.

Scovel's report found that the contingency plans of 13 airlines and 13 airports remained "limited in addressing long, on-board delays."

"There has been little improvement from what we reported in 2001 -- that only a few airlines' contingency plans specified in any detail the efforts planned to get passengers off aircraft when delayed for extended periods," the report said.

Nearly 28 percent of flights were delayed, canceled or diverted in the first seven months of 2007, Scovel's report noted. More than 50,000 flights had tarmac delays of at least one hour during the first seven months of the year, with passengers on 44 of those flights enduring a delay of at least 5 hours, according to the report, which can be found at http://www.oig.dot.gov/.

Among Scovel's recommendations:

¿ Airlines need to set time limits on tarmac delays and set targets for reducing chronically delayed or canceled flights.

¿ Airlines should post statistics for on-time flight performance on their Web sites.

¿ Customer-service agents should be required to report a flight's on-time record to passengers when they call to book tickets.

¿ Large and medium-size airports should be required to establish ways to monitor and mitigate lengthy on-board delays.

¿ A national task force of airlines, airports and regulators should be established to create plans to deal with lengthy delays.

The Department of Transportation issued a statement last night saying that "the Inspector General has done a thorough job in responding to our request to examine the series of unacceptable delays from earlier this year."

"We will review all of his recommendations very closely as we continue to take steps to address the growing congestion in the skies," according to the statement.

Members of the Air Transport Association, which represents the major U.S. airlines, "are thoroughly reviewing the IG's recommendations," David Castelvetter, a spokesman for group, said in an e-mail. "We look forward to sitting down with the Secretary and the IG to further discuss these recommendations."

Castelvetter added that most carriers have "already established timelines for beginning the process of determining whether to return to the gate and de-plane passengers or to continue on to the desired destination."

Washington's Reagan National and Dulles International airports have plans in place for lengthy tarmac delays if airlines request help. They include sending a mobile lounge or shuttle buses to planes to unload passengers, said Tara Hamilton, a spokeswoman for the airports.

Jonathan Dean, a spokesman for Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, said airport officials work with airlines to find open gates if they request them during lengthy delays.