Ask the pilot

There's no excuse for locking people in a grounded plane for 10 hours. But is legislation the way to fix the problem?

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

AP Photo/Richard Drew

JetBlue passengers wait for flights at JFK Airport, Feb. 15.

Feb. 22, 2007 | Last Wednesday, after a midwinter snow and ice storm slammed the northeastern United States, hundreds of JetBlue passengers at New York's JFK airport were stranded aboard grounded aircraft for as long as 10 hours. The incident made front-page news nationwide and has kept the talk shows busy for more than a week -- another glistening black eye for the beleaguered industry Americans love to hate.

Regrettably, we've seen this before. In late December, a massive storm system caused a similar drama to unfold at American Airlines. Nearly a hundred flights headed to that carrier's Dallas-Fort Worth megahub were diverted to other cities, where in some cases there were inadequate facilities and staff to handle them. One of those diversions, Flight 1348, sat on the tarmac at Austin, Texas, for more than eight hours. And perhaps most notorious of all, seven years ago in Detroit, thousands were stuck aboard Northwest Airlines planes for up to 11 hours during a New Year's weekend blizzard. These and other incidents have left people shocked, outraged and dismayed. Why, exactly, do such things happen? How are such preposterous situations allowed to develop?

The short answer is: I don't know, and I'm as appalled as you are. If you find it hard to imagine any plausible reason for locking people in a ground-bound plane for 10 hours, so do I, and frankly there isn't one. Such breakdowns are abhorrent and inexcusable.

The long answer mostly involves the capricious nature of weather and air traffic delays. It requires an understanding of the typical airline's interdepartmental communications and an acknowledgment of the vastness of the typical airline's network. Taking that last one first, a single large airline operates hundreds of planes, transporting hundreds of thousands of people daily across continents and oceans. Even little JetBlue, the 12th-largest carrier in the United States, flies some 50,000 people a day using more than a hundred aircraft. Whether in spite of or because of this, when things go bad, they sometimes go really bad.

When a storm hits, there are two kinds of delays. The first is a material delay -- the physical slowdown that inevitably results when human beings are forced to perform their duties in harsher than normal conditions. Once the snow begins to fall, planes tend to be late taking off for the same reasons that people tend to be late getting to work or school: We move more slowly; our vehicles move more slowly; aircraft need to be de-iced, and in some cases de-iced again. And so forth.

The second kind, which is usually more serious and harder to predict, is the air traffic control delay. Storms hinder the flow of traffic both locally (on and in the vicinity of the airport) and en route (along the high-altitude flyways that connect cities). Even in ideal weather the skies are crowded and delays common; throw in any number of specific meteorological complications -- icing, low runway visibility, strong crosswinds, possible wind shear, slick surfaces, etc. -- alone or in combination, and you've greatly reduced the number of allowable arrivals and departures. You can blame the ATC system itself -- one that has been glacially slow to adapt and modernize -- or you can blame the carriers that attempt to cram too many flights into already saturated airspace. Regardless, aircraft need to be choreographed into complicated instrument approach patterns; crosswinds or low visibility might render one or more runways unusable, and as local traffic backs up, the effects are soon felt hundreds, even thousands of miles away. A plane headed to New York City might be asked to fly a holding pattern over Pittsburgh. Or, as happens quite commonly, controllers issue "ground stop" orders preventing planes from ever leaving the gate.

What makes ATC postponements maddening to airlines and passengers alike is their fluidity. They change hour to hour, minute to minute. Typical scenario: A crew is preparing for a noontime departure from Washington to Chicago. Passengers are loaded, the aircraft is fueled, the checklists are complete. Suddenly, owing to a line of thunderheads somewhere above Ohio, there comes word of a ground stop. The pilots are assigned a "wheels up" time of 2 p.m., or two hours hence. Passengers are asked to disembark, with the plan to reboard at approximately 1:30. But then, 15 minutes later, ATC calls back with a revised time: The plane is cleared for departure immediately. Unfortunately, the passengers have all wandered off, to browse in the bookstore or have coffee at Starbucks.

Once a flight misses its ATC departure window, it usually goes back to the end of the queue and the clock starts again. And once that happens, the dominoes fall faster and harder. Pilots and flight attendants, remember, are subject to federally enforced flight and duty time limits. Once large numbers of crews begin timing out, it sends a ripple effect through a carrier's entire operational matrix that can last for days, affecting millions of fliers and costing millions of dollars.

So, while nobody enjoys sitting on a taxiway for long periods, keeping everybody together and at the ready often saves time in the long run. Ten hours? That's excessive and nobody denies it, but this is the thinking process that occasionally allows manageable situations to, yes, snowball out of hand.

Next page: What if passengers organize a mutiny and pop an exit?