Passengers Stalled as Airline Hits Rough Times

Air America, a small vacation airline that has experienced problems with its aircraft, has caused hundreds of passengers to begin their holidays hanging around Los Angeles International Airport for as long as two days.

A flight bound for Hawaii, scheduled to take off at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday with 350 passengers, finally left at 5 a.m. Wednesday.

A flight to Nassau, the Bahamas, scheduled to leave at 11:30 p.m. last Friday with more than 300 passengers, finally got off the ground on Sunday.

Travel agents said such delays on small airlines that have no backup equipment are always a possibility. Arrangements for such charter or special vacation package flights, they said, are usually made by passengers directly with the airline in response to advertisements offering bargain fares.

“I don’t want to say it is a common occurrence, but it is easy to see why a small airline would incur problems like that because they are not always going to have the resources to fall back on,” said David Jeffrey, spokesman for Airline Passengers of America, a nonprofit consumer lobbying group.

“When you pick between flying one of the biggest airlines in the world or a little obscure one,” Jeffrey said, “common sense is going to dictate that, on the small one, there is a greater possibility of inconvenience.”

Small Size Cited

Air America claims its problems stem from its size--only five airplanes, all wide-body L-1011s--and the popularity of its destinations during this peak summer vacation and holiday period.

Fred Davis, vice president of marketing for Air America, said the Nassau flight was postponed last weekend because Lockheed had delayed delivery of a plane that it was refurbishing for the airline. Davis said the airline expected to get the plane by Friday but that it was actually delivered on Sunday.

He said the Hawaii flight was delayed several times Tuesday while mechanics located the trouble indicated by an electrical component warning light. By 4 p.m., he said, they had found the problem, but it took all night to replace a faulty throttle cable that runs from the cockpit to the tail of the aircraft.

“It is tough to be delayed that long. I feel sorry for the customers,” Davis said Wednesday after the plane left for Hawaii. “We tried to rent another airplane from another airline, but every airline had all its equipment booked. It is the start of summer vacations.”

Davis said passengers were given meals and rooms overnight at the Airport Hyatt.

He said passengers on the long-delayed Nassau flight were offered full refunds if they chose to cancel their trips; or, if they chose to go, were housed in the Hyatt and Quality Inn hotels at the airport until the plane took off, and were given a $200 rebate when they landed in Nassau.

“Since some of the travel packages cost only $399,” he said, “we thought that was fair.”

The little airline delayed a flight for 340 Hawaii vacationers 26 hours on July 6, 1988, when one of its planes needed a new fuel valve. When the part could not be flown in from Chicago as arranged, Air America finally borrowed one from another airline.

Even major airlines can have long flight delays, some travel agents said, if a plane has a mechanical problem and all of the airline’s other planes are in use. But major carriers usually are better able to substitute equipment or find spare parts.

Travel agents Mary Castiglione and Lydia Plona of Associated Travel Inc. in downtown Los Angeles said they try to prepare passengers by giving them the percentage of an airline’s flights that are on time according to the Department of Transportation.

Air America, said Plona, who had booked one passenger on a delayed Air America flight to Hawaii, does not participate in that rating system.