Stuck On The Plane And There's No Recourse
After being stuck for 11 hours on a parked airplane during a snow and ice storm, JetBlue passengers found out there's nothing they can do about it.
There are no government regulations limiting the time an airline can keep passengers on grounded aircraft.
The airlines' voluntary code of conduct simply says that during such extraordinary delays, they will make "reasonable efforts" to meet passenger needs for food, water, restroom facilities and medical assistance.
But JetBlue's ice-storm meltdown is fueling new calls for a passengers' bill of rights — a law that would actually outlaw what happened, CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports.
Airlines have blocked attempts to set minimum legal standards for customer service by agreeing to a voluntary code of conduct that they have not always followed.
JetBlue is offering apologies, free tickets and refunds for not getting passengers off the planes sooner.
Kate Hanni says she won't trust airline promises. She was stranded for eight hours on an American Airlines jet in Texas over New Year's. Now, she's leading the passengers' revolt, Orr reports.
"It's not right and it was inhuman what happened to us and the only way we can be able to prevent it is by having a law passed," said Hanni, who leads the Coalition for Passengers' Bill of Rights.
Hanni's site has already collected 4,200 signatures.
The proposed bill of rights would ensure passengers are:
Sean Corrinet of Salem, Mass., spent almost nine hours Wednesday aboard a JetBlue flight for Cancun, Mexico, that never got off the ground. She said the crew passed out bags of chips — the only food available — and periodically cracked the hatch to let in fresh, cool air.
The airline acknowledged that it hesitated nearly five hours before calling for a fleet of buses to unload at least seven jets that spent the day sitting on runways because of the weather and congestion at the gates.
A similar incident happened in late December, when American Airlines and American Eagle diverted 121 flights bound for Dallas to other cities because of thunderstorms. About 5,000 passengers were left sitting on parked aircraft, some for eight hours.
The Dec. 30 incidents prompted American to say it would put a four-hour limit on how long passengers would be kept on grounded planes.
Hanni, of Napa, Calif., was one of the trapped passengers. Her flight was supposed to go from San Francisco to Dallas.
"We were put in the closest position to the terminal and allowed to sit for, actually, almost nine hours," Hanni told
. "They thought we would be able to (take off) for the first three hours. But then for the last six, six-and-a-half hours, they knew they wouldn't."Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said Thursday she will introduce a bill to give passengers the right to get off the airplane if it's been on the ground for more than three hours past its scheduled departure time.
The bill has been in the works for some time, and is not related to either this week's JetBlue's problems or Hanni's efforts.
In the late 1990s, the nation's 14 largest airlines joined forces to block a drive by Congress to enact legal protections for passengers. Those changes that were sought after a series of flight cancellations and delays.
Instead, the airlines agreed to an Airline Customer Service Commitment and incorporated it in their customer agreements, called "conditions of carriage," which are legally enforceable by the customer against the airline.
The airlines said they would notify customers of delays and diversions, try to deliver baggage on time, refund tickets promptly and meet customers' essential needs when they were stuck on parked airplanes.
The airlines, though, didn't agree to limit the amount of time they could keep people inside airplanes that aren't going anywhere.
By February 2001, the airlines were improving their customer service, according to a review by the Transportation Department's inspector general.
A short time later, the airline industry lost record amounts of money. Some sought bankruptcy protection following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic, the war in Iraq and rising fuel prices.
By November 2006, customer service had slipped at many airlines, according to Transportation Department Inspector General Calvin Scovell. Many airlines dropped their programs to control quality and measure performance, Scovell reported.
Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., chairman of the House Transportation Committee, blamed the Transportation Department for failing to enforce the customer service standards agreed upon in 1999.
In the case of JetBlue, Oberstar said the airline didn't have a plan to manage an extreme circumstance.
"The airline can't say, 'We didn't know, we didn't anticipate, this didn't happen before,'" Oberstar said.