Virgin Atlantic's Three Hour Tarmac Delay Whips Up Irrational Anger
It's been awhile since our last fun-filled aircraft ground delay of more than 3 hours, but fear not. Virgin Atlantic has given tarmac delay rule fans something to complain about. As you might expect, this is being completely overblown. But as an international flight, it's adding new flames to a fire that shouldn't even have been lit.
The basic story is this. Virgin Atlantic had a packed airplane happily winging its way from London/Heathrow to Newark this Tuesday, June 22. The plane was scheduled for a 7pm arrival, but it was delayed in London. Then, there was a problem. Around 715pm, a thunderstorm moved over the airport and sat there for about an hour. Uh oh. So the plane circled for awhile. Could the crew have just diverted earlier and gone to a Virgin Atlantic station like Boston or Washington? Sure, but my assumption is that they expected the storm to pass and they would be able to put down at Newark, where passengers actually wanted to be.
At this point, I'll assume the weather lasted longer than they had anticipated and they were forced to divert. Having waited long enough, they had burned enough fuel to require going to a nearby airport. By 8pm, the weather had also started rolling east over JFK so that was hardly an option. Hartford it was.
So they jet off to Hartford and land at 823pm. Now we have a few problems. First, Virgin Atlantic doesn't fly to Hartford normally, so they need to find someone to help them. Not a problem, I'm sure they didn't have trouble with that. But the bigger problem is that on an international flight, you can't just let people off the plane. They have to go through customs and immigration. Hartford is an international airport, but that hardly means people staff those facilities 24 hours a day. So, they had to call them in.
It took a couple of hours to get people there to process the 300 passengers into the US, so people were stuck waiting. There are a few different reports out there, but to the best of my knowledge, it appears that water was provided but food was not. That seems perfectly acceptable to me. I mean, on the 7 hour flight, people just had a bunch of food onboard. It's not like they had been starving for days.
The biggest issue seems to be that the air conditioning wasn't working and it got extremely hot on the plane. That's a real problem, but I can't imagine that the pilots did that deliberately. There must have been a malfunction, some reason why it didn't work.
Now, we have the usual suspects out there railing on the DOT and saying that the rule restricting airline ground delays to 3 hours needs to be extended from simply domestic to include international flights as well. That's not only not going to help in this instance, but it's going to hurt.
I realize I sound like a broken record on this issue, but the absurdity here is amplified in a situation like this. What good would this rule have done? Should the airline be punished because the customs and immigration officers can't magically beam themselves to the airport to get people off immediately? What exactly would you have wanted the airline to do in this case? Broken air conditioner? Not good. But what would a 3 hour rule have done? Magically fixed it?
An arbitrary three hour rule will only worsen cancellations and that makes it much harder to reaccommodate people on international flights because they're less frequent and there are more people who need to be accommodated on each flight.
In the last DOT rule recommendation, the suggestion was to require some of these provisions apply to international flights, but no hard time limit was suggested. Instead, the DOT asked for input from the public about whether or not a hard limit should be included.
It shouldn't. People need to stop assuming that regulation will magically fix this problem, because it won't.