"Travelers stuck on the Detroit runway in Spirit plane"

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Travelers stuck on the runway in Spirit plane
Delay at Metro typical of industry
BY JEWEL GOPWANI
The Detroit (MI) Free Press


Computer problems at a U.S. Customs checkpoint at Detroit Metro Airport kept
nearly 150 passengers from disembarking a flight from Cancun Monday night.

Depending on who you talk to, passengers waited anywhere from 90 minutes to
two hours and 40 minutes with little information about what was happening.

The wait is the latest case of airline passengers spending hours in parked
planes in an overly taxed air travel system, in which airlines, security and
air traffic controllers are trying to handle record numbers of travelers.

After Spirit flight 288 landed, travelers started to pull their bags from
the overhead compartments and were told to wait a few minutes, said Ken
Clein, an architect from Ann Arbor who was on the flight.

A few minutes turned into a half hour, which turned into an hour.

In the Customs area, officials working on overtime for the late-night flight
had arrived expecting the flight to land at 11:38 p.m. But the plane landed
20 minutes early.

As passengers waited, Customs officials prepared to process passengers
manually, said Ronald Smith, chief Customs and Border Protection officer.

Smith said that took about 50 minutes and passengers started to deplane at
12:30 a.m. Clein said the wait was about an hour longer than that, with
passengers leaving the plane at 2 a.m.

Inside the plane, the crew opened the plane's forward door for fresh air.
The planes toilets were working, but there was no running water in the
lavatories, so passengers couldn't wash their hands, Clein said.

While frustrating and uncomfortable for passengers, the wait paled compared
with other recent incidents of passengers trapped on planes.

In February, hundreds of passengers were stranded on JetBlue Airways flights
for as long as 11 hours, when winter storms caused hundreds of flight
cancellations.

In December, thunderstorms forced American Airlines and American Eagle to
divert more than 100 flights bound for Texas, leaving thousands of
passengers in planes.

"You put just a little bit of a glitch, like weather or Immigration,
something that puts a wrench in the works, you're going to have these types
of outcomes," said Dean Headley, associate professor of marketing at Wichita
State University.

A hearing is slated for April 20 before a House subcommittee to discuss
these issues. There have also been calls for a passenger bill of rights,
which would limit how long passengers are kept on parked planes.

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