Business Insight Zone

I’ve railed in the past about the failure of the airline industry to respond to the needs of its customers. Well, a New York state law is about to force the airlines to do something for passengers who get stranded on runways . . . and the airlines, with their brilliant sense of public relations, are going to court to stop it. I wish that someone within the airline industry would step up to take a more enlightened approach, but maybe at this point I should just give up hope.

Joe Sharkey of the New York Times — who you should be reading regularly if you care about what happens in the airline business — has more:

Airlines to Use Courts to Thwart a Movement

[New York state Assemblyman Michael] Mr. Gianaris says of the airlines[:] “They will sit there with a straight face and argue against a law that simply says that someone stuck on a plane for more than three hours is entitled to a drink of water and the use of a bathroom,” he said.

The New York law isn’t quite that simple. It says that an airline that leaves passengers sitting on a tarmac for three hours or more in New York has to provide “fresh air and lights, waste removal services and adequate food and drinking water.” It also requires airlines to post “complaint information” for passengers to contact the federal authorities as well as a new state Office of the Airline Consumer Advocate.

The state Airline Consumer Advocate office, in turn, will be able to refer complaints to the state attorney general, who can seek fines of up to $1,000 a passenger for “failure to provide required services to stranded passengers.”

Mr. Gianaris said that the bill was written carefully to avoid the potential for state intervention in matters that fall under federal authority, like requiring airlines to return aircraft to a gate after a certain period.

My earlier rants in this vein have included a call for sanity on the part of the airlines so that they can agree on some voluntary cap for how long planes will sit on runways without taking off. Here’s a snippet of what I wrote about that three months ago:

You’re telling me that the airlines can’t agree that, say, five hours is too long for passengers to sit on a runway? That no upper limit is acceptable? If a plane has already been sitting on a runway for five hours, the possibility that it will miss the chance to take off half an hour later is much, much less important than keeping the passengers on that plane from becoming even more furious about the delay. A voluntary four-hour cap, or a five-hour cap, or any cap, might do something to assuage passengers who are so far pretty much certain that the airlines are willing to treat them like garbage.

My point is that the airlines are fighting their own best interests by opposing regulations meant to protect customers from nasty treatment. The technical arguments about why it’s inadvisable to put a cap on time spent sitting on a runway? They don’t matter. The legal arguments about why New York can’t require airlines to clean the toilets and clear the air after three hours on the runway? They don’t matter. And why not?

Because the airlines are actively opposing the comfort of their passengers.

So long as the airlines keep doing that, it’s reasonable to assume that consumers will continue to revile them. If those consumers can’t get some sort of relief from the airlines themselves, it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll turn to legislators or federal regulators instead.

Sure, the airlines don’t want more oversight. Who does? But the horse is already out of the barn, and it’s out because of failures on the part of the airlines themselves. These problems do exist, whether the airlines want them to or not. And as they go about fixing them, the airlines would be better served not to antagonize — or appear to antagonize — their customers.