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The Flyers Rights Strand-In by CAPBOR is Sept. 19th at the Washington, DC Mall where a huge plywood airplane will help demonstrate what an airline passenger strand-in on the tarmac is really like! Here are full details on the Strand-In, including pictures and video clips.

CAPBOR, the Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights, organized the “Strand-In” to raise Congressional support for legislation to address serious flaws in current aviation policy. Airline passengers are being trapped on the tarmac for up to 9 hours without being allowed off the plane, in what the airline industry and the FAA euphemistically refer to as “flights of note.”

Fox News Video on Airline Strandings

Hundreds of thousands of airline passengers stranded on planes for hours on March 19, 2007.

Experience what it’s like on the tarmac: The Strand-In will be held Sept. 19 between 12th and 14th streets on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Find out more at the CAPBOR website created by Kate Hanni and designed to look like an airline pocket safety sheet. CAPBOR (flyersrights.org) was founded by Hanni and hundreds of other passengers who were stranded on several American Airlines planes for up to nine hours at Austin International Airport, December 2006.

Flyers Rights facetiously recommends passengers take an emergency kit containing:

1. SOS Signs
2. Astronaut diapers
3. List of edible airplane parts

Is it just coincidence that the CAPBOR Flyers Rights group had it’s blog (hosted at http://www.strandedpassengers.blogspot.com/ on Google’s Blogger platform) hacked and stolen just four days before the Strand-In?

Very strange timing indeed!

Federal Bureau of Transportation statistics show thousands of people are left stranded each week. Air travelers were stuck on the tarmac for three hours or more 276 times in July 2007 alone, including a runway delay of almost six hours by a JetBlue flight bound for Buffalo, N.Y., from New York’s JFK Airport on July 27.

JetBlue Passenger Tarmac Nightmare Video

“Our flight sat on the tarmac for 8 hours and then it was canceled and we had no way of getting home! We waited in 3-hour long lines and had to incur numerous extra charges. The best JetBlue did was give us a couple vouchers. We had to pay for taxis, hotels, and newer more expensive flight home through Southwest! Thanks JetBlue!”

Designed to get Congress to pass the Passenger Bill of Rights, the Strand-In, which will be held inside of a mock plane made of plywood rigged to simulate the conditions stranded passengers endure while being held hostage against their will, needs your support to help pass House bill HR 1303 and Senate bill S 678.

Sign the Flyers Rights petition online now!:
http://www.petitiononline.com/airline/petition.html

Similar passenger rights bill have twice previously failed to make it out of the House Aviation subcommittee, the perennial lapdogs of the airline industry:

106th Congress: H.R. 700 (Status: Introduced - Died in subcommittee)
107th Congress: H.R. 1734 (Status: Introduced - Died in subcommittee)

Current legislation introduced March 2, 2007 is still bottled up in subcommittee ‘hearings” aka “hide-ems” due to the heavy campaign contributions from airline industry lobbyists to all sitting committee members in both houses of Congress.

110th Congress: H.R. 1303 (Status: Introduced by Rep. Michael Thompson, Dem-CA on 3-2-07) - Currently bottled up in the House Transportation and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Aviation because it lacks the support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who strangely enough is also a Democrat from California.

Can’t you just smell the stench of airline lobbyists all over this one?

110th Congress: S. 678 (Status: Introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer, Dem-CA on 2-17-07) - Currently stuck in the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, this bill will die a quiet death without the Strand-In calling attention to it.

Here is an actual video clip made by a passenger while stranded for 7 hours on the tarmac at JFK airport in New York:
Passengers Stranded 7 Hours: Passenger In Plane Video

Delta Flight 6499 JFK to DFW on June 25 2007 experienced more than just a routine delay.. For seven hours, children screamed, while adults cried and begged to be let off. Distraught passengers were told by airline crew that they couldn’t be fed because Delta simply wouldn’t allow it.

In 1999, after the Northwest Airlines incident where Northwest was ordered to pay $7 million in damages to hundreds of stranded passengers stuck in a blizzard, all 14 major carriers signed a “Customer Service Commitment” pledging to make “every reasonable effort” to meet the essential needs of passengers on long-delayed flights. That helped stave off a “Passenger’s Bill of Rights” then moving through Congress.

How’s that working now? Not too good! Hence the need for the passenger Strand-In on The Mall to get the media spotlight focused on this airline passenger rights issue.

Curious about the worst airlines to fly for experiencing a tarmac strand-in or other “flights of note”? Airlines receiving a combined “F” or failing grade from CAPBOR:

• American Airlines
• United Airlines
• US Airways

How awful are they really? Well, even JetBlue - the butt of hundreds of Jay Leno jokes - at least rated a “D for Dismal” grade.

American Airlines achieved the dubious honor of worst of the worst:

The “When you’re on the ground they treat you like dirt” Award goes to American Airlines: No food, most known strandings, worst crisis mismanagement, highest “Time on the Tarmac” statistics. Highest negative score – 4.7.”

Flyers Rights recommends passengers take an emergency kit containing:

A more widespread meltdown at JetBlue in February was one of the incidents that led U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters to ask for an investigation into the causes of ground delays.

“I have serious concerns about airlines’ contingency planning that allows passengers to sit on the tarmac for hours on end,” Peters said in announcing the investigation in March. “It is imperative that airlines do everything possible to ensure that situations like these do not occur again.”

Tarmac delays occur in part because airlines and flight captains are loath to lose a chance to take off by returning to the gate and letting passengers off. Sometimes a gate is occupied or key equipment isn’t available to park the jets, often a problem when planes are diverted in flight by bad weather.

Support airline passenger rights! Tell your Congressional representative and your Senator the better pay attention to the Passenger Bill of Rights legislation and show their support by attending the Strand-In.

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