Saturday, January 12, 2013

Newark Liberty International (KEWR), Newark, New Jersey: Stuck on a plane for hours - Department of Transportation investigating airport delay

What can you do with 5½ hours of uninterrupted free time? You can watch six quarters of professional football on television, or read a Harry Potter novel or play more than 130 games of solitaire on your iPhone.

But when buckled into an airline seat for that long before the plane takes off, the allure of those pastimes could easily evaporate — especially if there’s a seven-hour flight yet to come.

Passengers aboard British Airways’ Flight 184 on Nov. 7 waited that long — 334 minutes, to be exact — on the tarmac at Newark Liberty International Airport as a nor’easter swirled around the jet before it eventually left for London’s Heathrow Airport.

Under federal regulations, international flights can’t stay on the tarmac for more than four hours without giving passengers a chance to disembark.

The delay — tied for the longest delay last year — is under investigation by the federal Department of Transportation. British Airways could face a hefty fine.

In an e-mail to The Star-Ledger, British Airways cited "several issues with the de-icing rigs that caused significant delays. British Airways will never compromise the safety of passengers, so the flight was held until alternative equipment could be used to complete the de-icing."

On Thursday evening, passengers at Newark Airport heading to Paris said such an experience would bring them to tears.

"During the first hour I’d play, or I’d read," said Nicole Paris, a 25-year-old Parisian. "But then after the second hour, yes, I’d cry."

Valerie Moray, 28, of Belgium, said she had been stranded on a tarmac in Brussels for two hours on a previous trip.

"You have nothing to do and of course you begin to be angry," she said. "It was awful, and that was only two hours."

Bill Mosley, a spokesman for the DOT, said weather may cause a delay, but it is not a good enough reason to leave passengers on a plane — only "safety, security or air traffic control-related reasons" qualify, he said. But, he added, "severe weather could cause or exacerbate such situations."

The Nov. 7 storm, coming nine days after Hurricane Sandy, was severe enough that airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights in the metropollitan area, according to Flightaware.com.

Last year, the DOT penalized four airlines for egregious flight delays and fined them a total of $445,000, Mosley said. That’s an improvement from 2011 when there were 35 tarmac delays. There were 12 delays lasting more than three hours in 2010, but a whopping 586 were reported in 2009.

The straw that may have broken the camel’s back occurred in August 2009, when a Minneapolis-bound jet landed in Rochester, Minn., because of bad weather. It sat on the tarmac from midnight until 6:30 the following morning. There was little food or water on board, and the toilets were filled and unusable.

That incident and others led Congress to enact a passengers bill of rights, which took effect in August 2011.

A few months later, on Halloween Eve, a freak snowstorm blanketed the metropolitan area and stranded planes up and down along the East Coast. A Jet Blue flight from Fort Lauderdale to Newark was diverted to Hartford, Conn., where it sat on the tarmac for more than 7 1/2 hours. Another Jet Blue flight to New York that day kept passengers aboard for seven hours.

The DOT is still investigating those and other incidents on the same day and no fines have yet been issued.

Under the congressional remedy, penalties could be as high as $27,500 per passenger, but in most cases are much less. The penalties kick in after 3-hour delays on domestic flights and four hours on international flights.

"These are negotiated civil penalties," Mosley said. "That’s the maximum that could be assessed if we don’t get a settlement."

On June 22 last year, Copa Airlines left passengers stranded aboard an aircraft at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for five hours and 34 minutes on a flight bound for Panama. Despite DOT rules that say passengers must be offered food and water two hours after leaving the gate, nothing was made available for more than four hours, according to a DOT investigation.

Pakistan International Airlines was fined $150,000 when its flight from England’s Manchester Airport to JFK was diverted to Washington Dulles Airport because of equipment problems in New York. It stayed on the airport tarmac for four hours and 47 minutes

On March 3, a New York-to-San Francisco Jet Blue flight was delayed for nearly three hours. Although the jet hadn’t left the gate, passengers weren’t told they could get off, as required by law.

Story:  http://www.nj.com

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