Passengers' bill of rights.

[Loose rivets]

Perhaps more serious for the claustrophobic among us, but a very important issue for all.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/opinion/23fri1.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

[Five Green]

It is all well and good to have a "Bill of rights" but there are also some reality checks needed here.

If New York gets hit hard with weather and you have decided to taxi you have giveen up your gate. As planes land and stay on gates, the gates become occupied for the duration of the storm. While this sounds rather obvious the difficult part is that the situation does not get this bad very often. So if you force a bill of rights on airlines they will cancel alot more often rather than take a chance of getting trapped in the grid lock.

So it is up to the pax do they want airlines to give up earlier and maybe wait in the terminal for a few days ? Or would they like airlines to try and launch and get the majority of flights airborne and the pax to where they want to go ?

[bomarc]

Puhlease!


If a plane gives up its gate, goes out and waits X amount of time and wants to return, AND THE GATE IS OCCUPIED...move the plane at the gate using a tug (put chains on the tug's tires if needed...they do in BOS, ORD, MSP and other snow airports).

Park the empty plane and now the gate is OPEN...bring in the passenger filled plane, get the passengers and small cary on items into the terminal...AND THEN MOVE that plane off the gate so another plane can come in.

The passenger luggage (belly) will take awhile.

A friend was flying a 767 in from England to JFK on the Valantine's day ice masacre. He didn't see how any tug or plane could be frozen to the ground, and if it was, why not shoot a little glycol to unfreeze it? It took him 2 hours of taxi time to the gate...1 hour of that was waiting for AF 777 to deice in the alley way. BUT much less than 10 hours!


I DON't Want a passenger bill of rights without an airline worker bill of rights too...hey, why not bring back the Civil Aeronautics Board ? They would make sure all airlines had the resources to handle the bad days (even if it meant higher ticket prices)


Jet Blue spent their money on TV sets...maybe a poor choice of resource allocation?

[danke]

bomarc,
You hit the nail on the head, PAX have to realize that travel cost will go up for procedures to prevent being stranded on an A/C. Hire more employees YEAR-ROUND (and added equipment) for these rare WX events will add to the ticket price.