Washington Ways: November 2008 Archives

Man, this woman is always angry. She's Kate Hanni, most vocal of the advocates of a passenger bill of rights. Hanni, of the Coalition for an Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, was the sole dissenting vote among 34 to the DOT's Tarmac Task Force, as the Department called the airport/airline/labor/passenger group that it set up to give guidance on dealing with extended delays during bad weather or mechanical failures.
In the end after lengthy meetings, the task force decide to push a voluntary plan that stresses frequent communications with passengers rather than such provisions as a mandatory return to the gate to allow passengers to deplane. The Task Force was created in December 2007 after such well-publicized events as a December 2006 eight-hour delay of an American Airlines plane at the Austin airport or the massive JetBlue 'meltdown' during a February 2007 ice storm at New York's JFK airport. Hanni, who happened to take part in the Austin disaster, promptly denounced the report as "an insult to airline passengers."

Just in time for the holiday rushes, the TSA says it will have its so-called self-select checkpoint lanes at all of the nation's airports by the middle of this month. This is a very good thing - if it works. The concept is relatively simple: instead of letting all airport passengers just line up and then get delayed behind the state legislator who forgets he has a .357 magnum in his briefcase ("darn, I forgot"), you can let people who think they know what they're doing get in a lane for other smart people and the people who know they don't know what they're doing get in another lane. And you can have a third lane for people who aren't sure where they should go. Are you following?