Thanksgiving is about here and most of us have family that are traveling to our dinner. There will be a lot of travelers coming in by air. It is unbeliveable to hear that a plane full of passengers held in the plane overnight.

Our government is fining, for the first time, airlines for stranding passengers on an airport tarmac, the Transportation Department reported Tuesday.

The $175,000 in fines against three major airlines for stranding passengers overnight in a plane at Rochester, Minn. on Aug 8th.

Could you imagine. I have not traveled by airline in a long time but when I did we got delayed and had to circle around for what seemed like an eternity before we were able to land. This was bad enough at the time. Again, that was many years ago.

We have family that flys out for the holidays but we usually have such bad weather that the delays are justified.

It is scary enough to fly but then you have pilots that mysteriously overshoot the airport. Now that is scary.

The airplane that is the reason for the fines, Continental Express Flight 2816 was on it’s way from Houston to Minneapolis carrying 47 passengers when thunderstorms forced it to divert to Rochester, where it landed about 12:30 a.m.

The airport was closed. The only airlines that had employees at the airport at the time was Mesaba Airlines and they refused to open the terminal for the stranded passengers. Now I am not sure but I don’t think that it would have hurt them to open up for passengers that don’t have any place else to go.

Continental Airlines and its airline partner ExpressJet, which operated the flight for Continental, were each fined $50,000. ExpressJet spokeswoman Kristy Nicholas said the airline can avoid paying half the fines if it spends the same amount of money on additional training for their employees on how to handle extended tarmac delays.

The department imposed the largest penalty – $75,000 – on Mesaba Airlines, a subsidiary of Northwest Airlines, which was acquired by Delta Air Lines last year.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement, “I hope that this sends a signal to the rest of the airline industry that we expect airlines to respect the rights of air travelers,” he further said, “we will also use what we have learned from this investigation to strengthen protections for airline passengers subjected to long tarmac delays.”

Can you imagine? The passengers of Flight 2816 were made to wait nearly six hours inside the airliner which is cramped and small all the while they were only 50 yards from a terminal. It was reported that the captain of the flight repeatedly pleaded to allow the passengers to enter the terminal.

In the morning they were allowed to deplane and finally enter the terminal. They spent about two and a half hours inside the terminal before reboarding the same plane to complete their trip to Minneapolis.

I know that there has to be someone in charge and able to make orderly discussions but I also think that they need to be someone with some common sense. To be able to tell the pilot that he can not allow people to enter the terminal is just wrong.

It’s as if your air travel has been stripped of any comfort what so ever now. The plane is not the most desired place to be in to travel to begin with because it is so cramped up, stuffy and just plain uncomfortable. You can’t bring anything on board with you so those passengers were just left there all night.

It was good news to hear that they were imposed with the fines. Do you have a flying experience that you would like to share? What do you think about the fines? Let me know with a comment below.

Related articles by Zemanta

• DOT fines airlines for six-hour tarmac delay (msnbc.msn.com)
• “Flight Delayed: Now Airlines Pay Fines For Tarmac Stranding” and related posts (huffingtonpost.com)
• Feds: Carrier, not crew, at fault in tarmac snafu (cnn.com)
• Airlines Fined for Stranding Passengers for Six Hours (abcnews.go.com)
• Rochester tarmac delay: “lack of common sense” (gadling.com)
• Pilot Pleaded to Evacuate Stranded Passengers (abcnews.go.com)

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