Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Leave trouble-shooting to airlines, industry leader
contends
Group president to speak today against passenger bill of
rights
By TERRY MAXON
The Dallas (TX) Morning News
James May knows that people are mad about the airline industry's
customer service problems.
Mr. May, president of the Air Transport
Association of America, is leading the airline industry's efforts to head off
federal legislation that would impose performance standards on the carriers. He
testifies today before the Senate Committee on Science and
Transportation.
The industry has been on the defensive since Dec. 29, the
day that bad weather disrupted operations at Dallas/Fort Worth International
Airport and left American Airlines Inc. airplanes stranded at a number of
airports.
The delays riled a bunch of passengers who were kept on
American's jets for lengthy periods, eight hours or more in some cases, and
prompted a move to create a passenger bill of rights to protect travelers from
bad airline service.
That unhappiness was amplified when a mid-February
winter storm snarled operations at airports in the Northeast, particularly at
New York's Kennedy International Airport where JetBlue Airways Corp. passengers
found themselves trapped on that carrier's airplanes for many
hours.
Legislation pending in Congress would force carriers to cancel
flights delayed beyond a certain point after a certain period of time and to
return passengers to airport terminals, as well as set other standards of
customer service.
Three groups, the Coalition for an Airline Passengers'
Bill of Rights, the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups and the Aviation
Consumer Action Project have spoken out in favor of the legislation, while two
other groups, the Air Travelers Association and the Business Travel Commission,
have opposed such legislation.
In the area Tuesday to meet with American
Airlines officials, Mr. May discussed the industry's reaction to the delays and
what he believes should be the answer.
What is the
airline industry's view toward these disruptions and the proposed passenger bill
of rights?
Actually, we are very sensitive, and we care a
great deal. What people tend to miss is that it's just as much in our interest
to complete these flights as it's in the passengers' interests, and complete
them on schedule. We have identical motivations.
It's so frustrating when
you have weather patterns like you have here and not complete the flights. We
need to get planes where they're going, we need to provision them for the next
flight, we need crews to not time out [exceed legal working hours] and not be
able to go on. We need to maintain those schedules.
It's literally a
matter of millions and millions of dollars when that doesn't happen. I think
delays costs the industry something north of $9 billion in 2006. So we have a
huge interest in it.
The misconception is that somehow Congress in its
wisdom knows better than the airlines how to schedule this massively complicated
environment more effectively. ... What all the legislation out there suggests is
that after three hours or some other set time limit, a select group of
passengers – one, two, five, whatever the case might be – would have the right
to demand that that plane return to a terminal, even if there's no gate
available, park in an area accessible to stairs, move the stairs up and get
people off.
Well, that effectively terminates the flight. When that
happens, pilots are going to time out, flight crews are going to time out,
they're going to have to worry about getting additional crews in, and the wishes
of the minority on that plane will trump the wishes of the majority, which is
'let's get it done, and let's get to where we're going safely,' because the only
reason we're not going is safety, is the weather. You can't legislate
effectively that kind of behavior. But it's done on the presumption that somehow
magically we don't care.
But does that mean the
alternative is that passengers are sometimes held on airplanes for eight to 10
hours?
In 2006, we completed 7,141,922 flights in the
United States, commercial flights. Thirty-six [were delayed] more than five
hours. We shouldn't have 36. That's inexcusable. But it's done in the industry
for very good reasons.
We've got to find a way to better schedule and
move around these weather events when they happen. ... Smart Skies [an
industry-backed effort to improve air traffic control] is a big part of the
answer because we're going to be able to do our flying more effectively as we
move around a lot of these weather fronts than we're able to do
today.
How should we handle the issue of the
customer service problems?
Every airline has to use its
own best judgment. They have their own consumer alert plans. At the request of
ATA, the DOT IG [Inspector General for the Department of Transportation] has
taken a look at that and will have a full report out in May as to whether they
are effectively living up to the conditions of their own plan.
I think
the way you can do that is on a case-by-case basis, airline-by-airline basis.
Because what happens in Austin or Dallas/Fort Worth is vastly differently from
the circumstances from even the JetBlue incident at JFK.