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Travelers having purchased cheap airplane tickets or cheap vacation packages no longer have to worry about sitting on a runway for over three hours wondering if their plane will ever take off. The Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that it has “accomplished our goal” of reducing runway delays where passengers are “stranded without access to food, water or working lavatories for hours on end.” Over the first 12 months that DOT’s new rule concerning extended runway delays was in place U.S. carriers experienced 20 delays of three hours or more on domestic flight, down from 693 during the preceding 12 months, a decline of over 97 percent. Critics of this rule predicted that it would result in airlines canceling more flights to avoid paying excessive fines for long runway delays. The number of flights that were cancelled after two hours of delay over the past 12 months has increased only slightly, according to the DOT. The DOT believed that if there were excessive cancelations by the airlines that this would be reflected in an increase in cancelations for flights delayed for two hours since those are the ones “most likely to be cancelled to avoid violating the rule.” There were 387 such flights canceled during the first 12 months under the rule, an increase of 51 over the 326 canceled flights canceled the prior 12 months. April airline on time performance dipped in April, with almost 76 percent of domestic scheduled flights arriving within 15 minutes of schedule vs. over 79 percent the preceding month and over 85 percent last year. The historic average is about 78 percent.
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