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Obama, friend to the suffering
Anyone who complains that the Obama administration has done nothing: they've done this. By executive fiat, mandated a 3-hour tarmac waiting rule and a lot of other items on the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights. Huzzah. Most of this agenda has been floating around Congress for about ten years.
Opponents of this provision, including Salon's otherwise admirable pilot columnist P. Smith, complain that the 3-hour rule is a blunt instrument. It is, but a blunt instrument is the necessary tool to beat the airlines over the heads to stop tarmac imprisonment. Smith says that if you disembark at the 3-hour mark, it'll take longer to get re-embarked than it would to just stay on board if the plane was scheduled to move at 3'30".
It would, but that assumes the plane really is going to move at that time. But you don't know that. That's where many of the 9-hour waits come from in the first place: assumptions that the flight is just about to clear, but whoops, no it isn't, wait another half-hour, then another, then another.
Not to mention that three hours is too long to be required to be continuously strapped into your seat, with no food, no available toilet, no air conditioning, even if the plane is moving.
Whenever corporations complain about onerous government regulations, it always turns out that they brought this on themselves by egregious misbehavior which the regulations were the only tool to prevent. Everything from the Sherman Act and the Food and Drug Act to Sarbanes-Oxley and now this. Free enterprise: the ever-flammable fuel of government regulation.
Opponents of this provision, including Salon's otherwise admirable pilot columnist P. Smith, complain that the 3-hour rule is a blunt instrument. It is, but a blunt instrument is the necessary tool to beat the airlines over the heads to stop tarmac imprisonment. Smith says that if you disembark at the 3-hour mark, it'll take longer to get re-embarked than it would to just stay on board if the plane was scheduled to move at 3'30".
It would, but that assumes the plane really is going to move at that time. But you don't know that. That's where many of the 9-hour waits come from in the first place: assumptions that the flight is just about to clear, but whoops, no it isn't, wait another half-hour, then another, then another.
Not to mention that three hours is too long to be required to be continuously strapped into your seat, with no food, no available toilet, no air conditioning, even if the plane is moving.
Whenever corporations complain about onerous government regulations, it always turns out that they brought this on themselves by egregious misbehavior which the regulations were the only tool to prevent. Everything from the Sherman Act and the Food and Drug Act to Sarbanes-Oxley and now this. Free enterprise: the ever-flammable fuel of government regulation.