Salon :: Tech & Business

Ask the pilot: There's no excuse for locking people in a grounded plane for 10 hours. But is legislation the way to fix the problem?

Last Wednesday, after a midwinter snow and ice storm slammed the northeastern United States, hundreds of JetBlue passengers at New York's JFK airport were stranded aboard grounded aircraft for as long as 10 hours. The incident made front-page news nationwide and has kept the talk shows busy for more than a week -- another glistening black eye for the beleaguered industry Americans love to hate.

Regrettably, we've seen this before. In late December, a massive storm system caused a similar drama to unfold at American Airlines. Nearly a hundred flights headed to that carrier's Dallas-Fort Worth megahub were diverted to other cities, where in some cases there were inadequate facilities and staff to handle them. One of those diversions, Flight 1348, sat on the tarmac at Austin, Texas, for more than eight hours. And perhaps most notorious of all, seven years ago in Detroit, thousands were stuck aboard Northwest Airlines planes for up to 11 hours during a New Year's weekend blizzard. These and other incidents have left people shocked, outraged and dismayed. Why, exactly, do such things happen? How are such preposterous situations allowed to develop?

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