For fliers delayed on a runway, there’s not much recourse

REMEMBER the prisoners of Northwest Airlines? Trapped by the thousands for hours in jets at the snowbound Detroit airport in January 1999, often without water or working toilets, these fliers became cause celebres for abused air passengers.

Back then, indignant congressmen proposed legislation to regulate these situations.

More than six years later, passengers stuck on the ground in uncomfortable conditions have no more legal recourse than they did in 1999.

Congress never enacted the proposed laws. The effort fizzled after major airlines, led by their industry group, the Air Transport Assn., based in Washington, D.C., adopted voluntary plans vowing to make “every reasonable effort” to provide services to trapped fliers.

Bob Olson of Corona faced this reality firsthand this summer. Twice in a month’s time, he said, he endured what he said were sweltering waits on the ground in jets.

On his June 27 flight to Minneapolis with his wife, Susan, and daughters Annika, 10, and Elena, 8, he said, the American Airlines jet sat for an hour on the ground at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport awaiting engine and air-conditioning repairs, then waited again to take off. Temperatures rose inside the cabin, but no water was offered, he said. Outside, the high at O’Hare that day was 95 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

“I kept looking at my daughters and thinking, ‘Are they going to last?’ ” said Olson, who works in healthcare management. “You feel so powerless.”

Finally the jet took off.

Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American Airlines, acknowledged the delay in departure. But, he said in an e-mail, the airline had no documentation of passenger complaints about the delay or the discomfort.

He also said that passengers should ask flight crews for assistance, which is “often the most expedient way to alert them to an issue.”

“Otherwise,” he said, “they simply may not know that a person is thirsty or uncomfortable.”

Traveling alone the next month, Olson said, he encountered a similar problem on America West, which he boarded the evening of July 20 to fly from Phoenix to Ontario, Calif.

For nearly two hours, by his account, the plane remained on the ground while the crew tried to fix the air conditioning. In a city where the high that day, according to the Weather Service, was 109 degrees, temperatures in the cabin reached at least 85 degrees, Olson figured.

Consulting the records

CARLO BERTOLINI, a spokesman for US Airways, which merged last month with America West, said he was surprised by Olson’s complaint because, “If we know we have to do a repair, we almost always go back to the gate.”

Bertolini said the airline’s records on Olson’s flight made no mention of air-conditioning repairs; instead it referred to a delay due to a problem with offloading cargo.

The records, he added, showed that the jet, which had a scheduled departure of 7:15 p.m., left the gate at 7:58 p.m. and took off at 8:19 p.m.

“Do we have any rights once the plane pulls back?” Olson asked.

Not really. At least, that’s what I concluded after posing Olson’s question to federal regulators; Terry Trippler, an airline expert with www.cheapseats.com, an online travel site; and J. Douglas Peters, an attorney with Charfoos & Christensen, a Detroit-based law firm that sued Northwest on behalf of the passengers trapped in 1999.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has no regulations requiring compensation for fliers trapped in jets or “relating to how long passengers can be held on the tarmac,” spokesman Bill Mosley said.

The Federal Aviation Administration stays out of this issue too, as “it has nothing to do with the safety of the flight,” spokesman Donn Walker said. “How comfortable airlines want to make it for their passengers is an issue for the airlines to decide.”

Civil law isn’t much help either, according to attorney Peters, who helped obtain a classaction settlement with Northwest that awarded an average of $1,300 each to 3,700 fliers in the Detroit incident. Unless there are many claimants, few attorneys will take your case because it’s expensive to sue an airline, he said.

On the positive side and despite Olson’s misfortunes, the trapped-passenger syndrome may be less common today than it once was.

In 1999 and 2000, the DOT logged more than 500 annual complaints from fliers in the category “departure delay taken on the tarmac; refusal to permit deplaning,” Mosley said. Starting in 2002, the annual number has dropped to 75 or fewer. The FAA’s Walker said the drop might be partly due to a decrease in airline traffic. But, he added, after the flood of complaints several years ago, “airlines took a lot of heat from their customers and took it upon themselves not to let it happen again.”

All eyes on the clock

THE carriers say they take pains to avoid leaving customers languishing in jets on the tarmac and do their best to make fliers comfortable. But weather, air traffic and other delays -- often at the destination airport -- may turn up unexpectedly after a jet leaves the gate, they say.

“When ‘creeping’ delays happen,” said Robin Urbanski, a spokeswoman for United Airlines, “and the captain has already made a decision to wait in line on the tarmac, it is hard to turn the plane around and go back to the gate, given the positioning of other aircraft around you.”

It can also be tough to figure how long a repair may take. These uncertainties may leave crews with a dilemma: Do they return to the terminal and risk losing their place in line for takeoff? Or just tough it out? “No one wants to wait,” US Airways’ Bertolini said. “But it could be worse to go back to the gate and be delayed even more or possibly have the flight canceled.”

Some passengers may suspect that the jet pushes off from the gate so that it can log an on-time departure -- even when it’s not ready to fly. Airlines deny they do that. In fact, arrival times, not departures, are what the DOT uses to rank carriers in its monthly reports on their on-time performance. (It does show on-time departures by airport.) But Bertolini and others in the industry said it is common for airlines to award bonuses to employees based on company-wide goals for on-time departures from the gate.

Some suggestions if you find yourself on a grounded jet:

* Take the initiative. Ring your service bell if you need water or other assistance.

* Don’t be belligerent. Having an altercation with a flight crew can be a federal offense.

* Write the airline and ask for compensation. “Airlines should be held accountable,” Trippler said, especially for something as clearly their fault as a mechanical problem.

Jane Engle welcomes comments but can’t respond individually to letters and calls. Write to Travel Insider, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.