Airline and Airport News

It turns out there are a number of interested parties following the Justice Department's investigation into possible collusion among U.S. airlines.

In particular, it is travel-related businesses that have expressed some concern.

“We applaud the Department of Justice for its interest in protecting air travel for consumers,” the Travel Technology Association (Travel Tech) said in a statement. “There is less competition in air travel due to carrier consolidation. As a result, it is more important than ever that consumers continue to have the ability to effectively shop for transparent travel options across suppliers.”

The Travel Technology Association represents many of the websites consumers use to book travel, including Orbitz, Expedia, Priceline, Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport, Skyscanner, Airbnb, HomeAway, TripAdvisor, CheapOAir, and Vegas.com.

As such, it has a bone to pick with airlines that it says have adopted policies that restrict the availability of fare and schedule information in the marketplace.

Negatively impacting consumer welfare

“Limiting access to airline content through the independent channel – which provides travelers with the transparency and choice they demand – negatively impacts consumer welfare,” the group said.

In a study it released in May, the association claims that if airlines are successful in efforts to restrict access to flight information, ticket prices would rise more than 11% for leisure and unmanaged business travelers. That, I says, would translate into about $30 more for the average ticket.

“Preserving the competitive benefits of consumers’ ability to access comparative and transparent information on prices and schedules of major U.S. airlines is more important than ever,” writes Scott Morton, author of the study. “At a time when independent, transparent comparison shopping is most needed, some airlines are attempting to restrict access to their fare and schedule information, reduce the ability of consumers to easily compare prices, and drive travelers to their own websites, which do not offer price comparisons with other airlines.”

Statements by airline executives

The association has also expressed concern about recent statements by airline executives during a June round table discussion in Miami, hosted by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). The group of airline CEOs reportedly talked approvingly of recent actions by a U.S. airline to implement new discriminatory surcharges on consumers who choose to book travel through third-party channels.

“The events at the Miami IATA meeting may suggest a coordinated effort by the airlines present – and by the larger trade group – to promote and potentially collectively impose the surcharge,” Travel Tech said. “Those events raise serious questions as to whether the airlines and IATA departed from their obligations to compete, not coordinate, when it comes to the imposition of fares, fees and surcharges on their customers.”

Travel Tech is not the only trade group unlikely to volunteer as character witnesses should the Justice Department eventually bring anti-competitive charges against United, America, Delta and Southwest airlines – the objects of the probe. Others in the travel industry might prove reluctant as well.

Alarm

Earlier this month the U.S. Travel Association expressed “alarm” at the government's announcement of the airline investigation. Association CEO Roger Dow worried that the traveling public is already “jaded” about flying and hoped that, where the Justice Department sees smoke, there is no fire. Still, he says the airline industry has invited much of this unwelcome scrutiny.

"If not for the radical consolidation we have seen in the airline industry in the last few years, we probably would not even be having this conversation,” Dow said. “Now that 4 carriers control 85% of domestic routes, 'collusion' is a thought that's constantly going to be in the back of the minds of federal regulators.”

Dow says Congress could increase airline competition by making it easier for airports to raise funds for expansion. Many Wall Street analysts disagree, however. They says airlines have only recently become profitable by consolidating and, in essence, reducing competition.

The chief executive of beleaguered JetBlue is winning kudos from crisis management experts less than 10 days after the ice storm that put his airline into the deep freeze.

A contrite David Neeleman has issued profuse public apologies on network television, on the video-sharing site YouTube, on newspaper front pages, and on the JetBlue website.

He's not only offered millions of dollars in compensation but issued a consumer-friendly Passenger Bill of Rights, retroactive to cover the victims of the newest St. Valentine's Day massacre, with vows to enforce it.

He's told employees -- the prime target of customer wrath -- to put on the friendly face JetBlue patrons experienced prior to the Feb. 14 fiasco.

Most importantly, Neeleman has looked and sounded sincere in all his public appearances.

Crisis management experts have noticed.

"People see through it when the typical CEO hides behind the podium or the press release," said Bernstein Crisis Management president Jonathan Bernstein. "(Neeleman) gave the public ample face time and did so with passion in his voice. He talks the talk of everyman, which is exactly what he needed to do."

Fellow Californian Alex Anolik, a San Francisco attorney who represents travel agents and tour operators, agreed. He called JetBlue's Passenger Bill of Rights "a good PR move."

Richard Levick, president of the Washington-based Levick Strategic Communications, went even further. "JetBlue has run to the crisis, taking responsibility not just for itself but for the entire industry."

According to Levick, JetBlue's CEO met all five key tenets of sound crisis management:

1. Run to it. Avoid "duck and cover."
2. All companies will have a crisis. Be prepared.
3. Know your crisis team. Now.
4. Make a sacrifice. Companies often want to win it all.
5. Avoid saying "no comment." A crisis abhors a vacuum.

"The critical role is to run to the crisis," he said. Accepting responsibility with sincerity also may defray legal consequences.

"People don't want to sue people they like and trust," Levick noted. "What happens so often is that CEOs lawyer-up and say nothing."

Such actions often hurt the company, he said, because media reports are based solely on the reactions of victims and their elected representatives.

For his part, Neeleman admitted to being "humiliated and mortified" by the weather-caused snafu that kept seven flights on the JFK airport tarmac for times that ranged from six-and-a-half to nearly ten-and-a-half hours. Food, water, working toilets, and patience ran out.

It took six days -- and a total of 1,000 cancelled flights -- to get JetBlue's schedule back to normal.

Neeleman swears that won't happen again. Now he has to hope that prospective passengers believe him.

The mystery of the disappearance of Flight MH370 is fueled, in large part, because we just don't know what happened to the Malaysia Airlines jet in the minutes after communication with ground controllers broke off.

Was the plane hijacked or did it suffer some catastrophic event? We won't know unless or until investigators can recover the “black boxes,” devices that are aboard every commercial airplane.

There are two black boxes, which are actually orange. One, the Flight Data Recorder, records the activity of aircraft systems. The other, the Cockpit Voice Recorder, records conversation among the flight crew in the cockpit. Located in the tail of the aircraft, these boxes can help investigators piece together the events that lead to a crash.

No black boxes

But MH370, along with its black boxes, is nowhere to be found, leaving investigators completely in the dark about what happened to the aircraft, and why. Some aviation experts have argued for some time that technology now allows this data to be available to investigators instantly, long before crews arrive at the scene of an air disaster.

"It's time to move the black box to 'the cloud' at least for essential limited flight recorder data for long flights over areas like the Indian Ocean, or other remote areas across large land masses like across the Brazilian Amazon," said Oliver McGee, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Technology Policy in the Clinton Administration.

The idea of remote flight data collection began to get serious discussion following the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, which plunged into the South Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. It took two years to located the wreckage and retrieve the black boxes.

Time to enter 21^st century

Mark Rosenker, former chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, told Reuters the MH370 disappearance is all the more reason to find a way to record at least some of each aircraft's data in the cloud. It's time, he says, to bring accident investigation into the 21^st century.

Some aviation experts say the technology to stream aircraft data to the cloud for real-time access already exists. Others say it's too costly for the industry to justify. But Peter Stewart, senior vice president for strategy and partnerships at technology firm PGi, says it should be a priority.

"We need to dig deeper into the technical details of retrieval and storage of cloud data systems, as well as, observe how other industries and firms have transformed how they store and transmit data," he said.

These technology experts concede the enormous bandwidth requirements to transmit constant, real-time data from an aircraft. But they argue limited data retrieval is possible, and is better than no data.

In fact, planes currently have the capability to transmit limited data about engine performance to remote storage servers. In the case of the missing Malaysia jetliner, there is no evidence any such data was sent or retrieved.

So, until the black boxes can be located and examined, what happened to MH370 remains a mystery.

American Airlines flight 1348, bound from San Francisco to Dallas-Fort Worth on Dec. 29 sat on an Austin runway for nearly nine hours while fierce but slow-moving thunderstorms pounded the state of Texas.

Food, water, and patience were soon in short supply, along with working toilets.

But passengers had plenty of time to prepare the groundwork for a new Congressional lobbying group called the Coalition for Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights. With consumer-conscious Democrats controlling both houses, passage of legislation seems more likely than it did in 1999.

That was the year the airline industry adopted a voluntary standard that effectively killed a bill created after a Northwest plane was stranded on the tarmac for many hours.

Story continues below video

Furious passengers from the latest fiasco insist the voluntary standard is worthless. They've started a website called www.flyersrights.org/index.php.

"Enough is enough," said American passenger Kate Hanni in a Jan. 22 press release published by the coalition. "This is not the first time, nor it is likely to be the last, that this kind of degrading treatment is visited on passengers.

"Thousands of legitimate complaints by travelers mistreated by the airlines are regularly dismissed or inadequately addressed by the industry," she fumed.

Now that the legacy carriers are making money again, they do not figure to retain the sympathy of lawmakers who voted them generous subsidies and immunity from lawsuits after their airplanes were used in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In fact, carriers could be in for a rude awakening after legislators collect all the testimony from passengers trapped in grounded planes on New Year's weekend.

Flight 1348, for example, was an hour late leaving San Francisco because of a mechanical problem. Had that delay not occurred, it could have reached DFW before the bad weather arrived. Instead, the MD-80 was diverted to Austin as one of 85 American flights diverted from Dallas that day.

Not until 12 hours after departure from San Francisco could passengers disembark.

American flight 37 from Zurich to Dallas suffered a similar fate, landing at the airport in Tulsa, which did not have the appropriate customs and immigration personnel to clear passengers for entry into the U.S.

By the time the flight finally reached Dallas after a 10-hour wait on the Tulsa tarmac, the Zurich passengers had been on board for 22 hours.

AA flight 1682 from Oklahoma City pushed back from the gate at 2:07 p.m. and sat on the tarmac for eight hours and two minutes before it was cancelled and sent back to the gate.

Austin airport authorities, overwhelmed when 14 planes landed unexpectedly, managed to move flights headed for Chicago or St. Louis but didn't do much for Dallas planes other than deliver food and drinks. The only passengers allowed off flight 1348 were 20 passengers whose final destinations were Austin or San Antonio. Luggage retrieval posed additional problems.

Passengers remaining in their seats claim they suffered from hunger, thirst, unsanitary conditions, and anxiety caused by unfulfilled promises from the captain plus the frustration of watching other planes come and go from the four American gates at the Austin airport.

Witnesses said a woman complained her diabetes medication was packed in her luggage -- the result of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) guidelines limiting liquids in carry-ons -- while a smoker ran out of Nicorette gum. They added that hungry babies screamed incessantly.

Fifteen of the stranded passengers from AA flight 1348 explained their complaints in a letter sent to U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.

The proposed Passenger Bill of Rights would require that airlines:

• Establish procedures for returning passengers to gates during delays so that no plane sits on the tarmac longer than three hours;

• Provide passengers with food, water, sanitary facilities, and medical needs during delays that exceed three hours;

• Publish updated lists of flights delayed at least a half-hour 40 per cent of the time in any given month;

• Compensate bumped passengers or those delayed by cancellations or postponements of more than 12 hours by a refund worth 150 percent of the ticket price;

• Create a passenger review committee, including consumers, with the formal ability to review and investigate complaints.

Though it admitted no wrongdoing, Northwest settled a class-action lawsuit by paying $7.1 million in compensation to more than 7,000 storm-stranded passengers who sat on the Detroit tarmac on Jan. 3, 1999. That action is likely to be used as a precedent in any litigation arising from the American case.

Northwest now refuses to let passengers sit on airport tarmacs more than three hours.

For its part, American apologizes to stranded passengers and sent them vouchers valid for future flights.

According to AA spokesman Tim Wagner, "We have examined our reaction to the weather that day and we have reemphasized areas of our procedures that will help ensure that the situation never happens again."

Industry-wide, flight delays and reports of lost bags have both climbed steadily over the last four years. Staff and service cuts, coupled with congestion in the air and on the ground, have been major contributing factors. In addition, federal rules limit the number of hours flight crews work per day, sometimes making it impossible for delayed flights to take off because the crews have exceeded their allotted time.

Southwest Airlines faces $328,550 in fines for two alleged safety violations, including one involving a loss of cabin pressure during a flight from Boston to St. Louis.

The Federal Aviation Administration said that on May 13, 2013, a Southwest Boeing 737 lost cabin pressure, the cabin’s oxygen masks deployed and the aircraft made an emergency landing in Baltimore.

The FAA alleges that after the event, Southwest mechanics failed to complete a mandatory inspection to check whether the change in cabin pressure damaged the aircraft and to ensure used oxygen bottles were replaced.

The airline allegedly operated the plane on 123 flights before completing the inspection on June 3. 

Additionally, the airline allegedly operated the aircraft on May 14 and 15 flights with two of the four portable oxygen units unserviceable.

Further, the agency alleges the airline operated the aircraft on approximately 120 additional flights with a portable oxygen unit that did not comply with federal regulations. The FAA proposes a $265,800 civil penalty in this case.

In the second case, the FAA alleges Southwest failed to comply with Federal Aviation Regulations for accurately recording repairs in an aircraft’s logbook. 

On March 18, 2013, the pilot of a Boeing 717 operated by Southwest Airlines under the Air Tran Airways livery reported seeing ice and water coming from the jetliner’s galley vent. Over the next few weeks, maintenance technicians replaced several components in an attempt to correct the problem, which was traced to a faulty component in one of the aircraft’s air-conditioning systems. 

The FAA alleges that the airline failed to follow proper procedures in making the repairs and detailing them in the logbooks. And it said the aircraft was flown on several passenger-carrying flights before repairs were completed. The FAA proposes a $62,750 civil penalty in this case.