Posted on 09/20/2007 10:06:08 AM PDT by vietvet67
Like thousands of American Airlines passengers last Dec. 29, Kate Hanni and her family were stuck aboard a jet for hours out on the tarmac. They were hungry, bored, angry and, in the case of Flight 1348, sick from the smell wafting through the cabin from the lavatories.
When the ordeal finally ended, some passengers from the 67 separate American flights - which each spent at least three hours stranded - e-mailed or called in their complaints to the airline. Some vented on blogs. Most grumbled and went about their business. And the airline industry thought it would, too.
Hanni, who said she had never before written a letter of complaint, decided she would get a law passed making lengthy confinement on an airplane illegal. "I was fuming," she said. "It was imprisonment."
She thus became an unlikely and, thus far, powerful adversary to an industry accustomed to riding out its major service lapses with only the lightest of government scrutiny.
A successful real estate agent, occasional rock 'n' roll singer and mother of two, Hanni essentially put her life on hold to take on the airlines, leaning on her husband to earn more and spend more time looking after their children so she could battle the lobbying might of the airlines.
With the help of Internet chat boards, videos shot by stranded passengers that were posted on YouTube and a growing network of volunteers, she has gathered 18,000 signatures on an online petition supporting what she calls a passengers' bill of rights.
Her congressman, Representative Mike Thompson, Democrat of California, quickly introduced legislation at her behest to force airlines to let passengers off stranded planes after three hours, with two 30-minute extensions at the pilot's discretion.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
It's quite impressive.
But it's also not idling.
And if I have to take the metal ladder off the plane down to the tarmac and walk 400 yards to the terminal, fine. I'd rather do that than sit for hours.
I'd rather drive for two days than fly for 6 hours. /rant off
“I’d rather drive for two days than fly for 6 hours.”
While staying for a while in an area about 1 1/2 hour south of Chicago, I myself found it more enjoyable to rent a car and drive (6hrs) to Kansas City than to drive to Chicago and take a flight. Given the departure delays, the flight times and the drives to and from the airports, the door to door car trip was much more relaxing.
Now, if there had been a high-speed rail option, from downtown to downtown, I might have used it. I think “regional” air trips could become obsolete, if we could privitize Amtrack and give the new owners tax incentives for capital investments.
Right now, due to all the politics inherent in a government corporation, Amtrack is burdened with continuing (subsidizing) dozens of unprofitable long distance routes - New York to New Orleans for example - while the Northeast Corridor routes - along densely populated Boston-NY-D.C. - are the only ones making any money (and, they do so because the rail trip - door to door, downtown to downtown - is price and time competitive with flying).
“Amtrack” should become like the Interstate highway system, simply supply the routes, as the builder and maintainer of the rail-bed, while private companies obtain licenses to run train private services on them; services those companies chose to run, not services they are mandated to run. In that environment, capital investors will invest in profitable rail service plans and train service will likely improve to the point of putting regional plane services out of business.
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