Word: tarmac
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...JetBlue airplanes sat on the tarmac at New York's JFK Airport for more than nine hours. That incident came less than two months after over a hundred American Airlines and American Eagle planes sat on tarmacs throughout the South for up to 10 hours. Uproar by angry passengers ensued and lawmakers threatened legislation to prevent further "tarmac strandings...
...defense, the airline industry pointed to the official data on tarmac delays as recorded by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), the federal agency responsible for tracking delays on behalf of the Department of Transportation. According to that data, 36 planes sat on the tarmac for more than five hours in 2006. "We have 7.2 million flights in the United States each year. This kind of a thing happens a fraction of a fraction of the time," David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association (ATA), which represents 90% of consumer carriers in the U.S, said...
...turns out that the BTS data on tarmac delays is inaccurate. Currently, the BTS does not record the total time a plane spends on the tarmac if the plane returns to the gate and then later takes off. It also does not include the tarmac delay times if the plane had been diverted from another airport or if the flight is ultimately cancelled, says David Smallen, a BTS spokesman. Those flights are just recorded as "diverted" or "cancelled," regardless if passengers have sat on the planes for hours, according to Smallen...
...such incident involved American Airlines flight 1348, which was supposed to fly from San Francisco to Dallas on Dec. 29. The flight was among the 69 that American diverted that day because of storms in Texas. Passengers aboard flight 1348 ended up landing in Austin and sitting on a tarmac there for almost nine hours before they were allowed to deplane because no gate was ready. But according to the BTS records, flight 1348 was simply "diverted." "It's like our flight didn't even exist," says Kate Hanni, a passenger onboard flight 1348, which she says had overflowing toilets...
...Mogel wasn't the only person to discover delay discrepancies. Rep. Jean Schmidt, a Republican from Ohio, did some digging of her own after being delayed on an airport tarmac for two hours in January. Schmidt, who sits on the House Infrastructure and Transportation Committee, was also shocked to find the loophole. In June, she introduced a bill that would require the BTS to record tarmac delays of all flights, regardless of returns to the gate, diversions or cancellations. "I think we need to know what the true picture is of these delays, because it could be underreported...