UNITED BENETTON of COLORS

16 April, 2007 Travelers stuck on the runway in Spirit plane

Delay at Metro typical of industry

April 11, 2007

BY JEWEL GOPWANI

FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

Computer problems at a U.S. Customs checkpoint at Detroit Metro Airport kept nearly 150 passengers from disembarking a flight from Cancun Monday night.

Depending on who you talk to, passengers waited anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours and 40 minutes with little information about what was happening.

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The wait is the latest case of airline passengers spending hours in parked planes in an overly taxed air travel system, in which airlines, security and air traffic controllers are trying to handle record numbers of travelers.

After Spirit flight 288 landed, travelers started to pull their bags from the overhead compartments and were told to wait a few minutes, said Ken Clein, an architect from Ann Arbor who was on the flight.

A few minutes turned into a half hour, which turned into an hour.

In the Customs area, officials working on overtime for the late-night flight had arrived expecting the flight to land at 11:38 p.m. But the plane landed 20 minutes early.

As passengers waited, Customs officials prepared to process passengers manually, said Ronald Smith, chief Customs and Border Protection officer.

Smith said that took about 50 minutes and passengers started to deplane at 12:30 a.m. Clein said the wait was about an hour longer than that, with passengers leaving the plane at 2 a.m.

Inside the plane, the crew opened the plane's forward door for fresh air. The planes toilets were working, but there was no running water in the lavatories, so passengers couldn't wash their hands, Clein said.

While frustrating and uncomfortable for passengers, the wait paled compared with other recent incidents of passengers trapped on planes.

In February, hundreds of passengers were stranded on JetBlue Airways flights for as long as 11 hours, when winter storms caused hundreds of flight cancellations.

In December, thunderstorms forced American Airlines and American Eagle to divert more than 100 flights bound for Texas, leaving thousands of passengers in planes.

"You put just a little bit of a glitch, like weather or Immigration, something that puts a wrench in the works, you're going to have these types of outcomes," said Dean Headley, associate professor of marketing at Wichita State University.

A hearing is slated for April 20 before a House subcommittee to discuss these issues. There have also been calls for a passenger bill of rights, which would limit how long passengers are kept on parked planes.

Posted by THE SAINT :: Monday, April 16, 2007 :: ---------------oOo---------------