LIANE HANSEN, host:
For many travelers, the holiday season has not been very festive. Thousands of people were stuck in airports or waiting for canceled or delayed flights to be rescheduled during a blizzard that hit the East Coast Christmas weekend. The bad weather caused a domino effect, as flights were canceled and planes were routed away from the storm.
Joe Sharkey is the business travel columnist for The New York Times, and he's in the studio of member station KUAZ in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to the program, first of all. And happy new year.
Mr. JOE SHARKEY (Columnist, The New York Times): Thank you, Liane. Same to you.
HANSEN: Do you have a sense of just how many flights were delayed or canceled over the holidays?
Mr. SHARKEY: Yeah, I think the figure is about 10,000.
HANSEN: Whoa.
Mr. SHARKEY: That's sort of a rough number but that's a pretty good number.
HANSEN: And we're just talking about domestic flights. I mean...
Mr. SHARKEY: Yes.
HANSEN: ...into the United States.
Mr. SHARKEY: Over a five-day period, 10,000. So it was a sort of a pitiful performance. But the air travel system, my impression is that the air travel system had a stress test and the results were not very good at all.
HANSEN: Now, a federal regulation that was put in place in April forbids airlines from leaving passengers on the tarmac for more than three hours. And if airlines don't comply, they're subject to hefty fines. How did this new rule play out this past week, in the middle of this mess?
Mr. SHARKEY: I think it was a factor, Liane. I don't think it was the driving factor, because obviously this was a major snowstorm and the New York airports were a mess. But the Tarmac Rule, as it's called, which fines airlines up to $27,500 per passenger for flights that are on the tarmac for over three hours, that was a definite factor.
The incentive is there to, if there's any doubt about whether you're going to have a plane stuck on the tarmac, just cancel that flight preemptively. So it contributed to the mess in some ways.
In other ways, do you want to be in the airport, which may resemble the, you know, the battlefield from "Gone With the Wind" or do you want to be on an airplane for eight hours? And, you know, the answer that every one of us would give is, well, I'd rather be in the airport, as bad as it might be there.
HANSEN: Well, during the blizzard, there were passengers on some international flights that were stuck on the tarmac in New York for many, many hours. There was one case, Cathay Pacific passengers coming from Bangkok waited for 12 hours to get off the plane. Does the rule apply to international flights?
Mr. SHARKEY: No, it does not. And there you see the difference. That's a really good example, the Cathay flight - 12 hours. Imagine 12 hours on an airplane, the airplane is full, you can't walk around. Things deteriorate real quickly inside that metal tube, particularly when the lights start to go and, you know, the restrooms start to get backed up and, you know, that's a tough 12 hours. I wouldn't want to do it.
HANSEN: So is it because it's an international airline, the fact that it comes from a different country?
Mr. SHARKEY: Yeah, that's right. The DOT rules do not yet cover international airlines and things like that. You can't just sort of willy-nilly impose fines on a foreign entity in air travel, as far as I understand it.
I know that Secretary LaHood at the Transportation Department, who's a bear on this issue and who's responsible for the Tarmac Rule, the DOT is trying to work on a way that would lasso in international airlines in some way, shape or form to at least let them know that there is a consequence to stranding people, you know, for 12 hours. And the consequence can be rather severe but we haven't yet seen what they're going to do. I would expect that we're going to hear something soon, because there's so much pressure from this particular crisis.
HANSEN: But looking forward to 2011, it seems from what you're saying about what happened over this holiday season and the fact that the airlines are not interested in playing this $27,500 fine for every passenger that's stuck on the tarmac for three hours, that when weather occurs, we're going to see more flights canceled.
Mr. SHARKEY: I think so. I think that we've already seen those numbers going up. And there's an argument between DOT and the airlines about how many flights actually have been canceled. Not, you know, not last week but before that because of this rule. The airlines say a lot. DOT says, nah, you know, you're cooking these numbers.
But yeah, I think from my point of view, more flights are being canceled on just the idea that bad weather might occur. Whereas before, you would try, you know, the pilot, the captain would try to get the airplane off the ground even if it meant sitting for a couple of hours.
HANSEN: Joe Sharkey is a business travel columnist for The New York Times and he spoke to us from member station KUAZ in Tucson, Arizona. Thanks again. And again, happy new year.
Mr. SHARKEY: Thank you and happy new year to you, Liane.
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