More airline passenger protections are waiting in wings

CHICAGO — Federal officials are putting the finishing touches on another round of airline passenger protections, including broadening restrictions on tarmac delays to include overseas carriers that land at U.S. airports.

The U.S. Department of Transportation expects to issue a final ver

sion of the regulations as early as April. A preliminary version of the rules, published in June, proposed new guidelines for everything from how airlines compensate people “bumped” from oversold flights to how carriers display baggage fees on their websites.

The latest consumer measures come as airline industry experts continue to debate the effectiveness of a controversial 2010 rule that set fines of $27,500 for every passenger on domestic flights that idle at a large or medium hub airport for more than 180 minutes.

Proponents of the rule point to the Dec. 26 storm that shuttered New York City’s airports and snarled air travel for much of the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Although airports were crippled by snow and ice, no U.S. carriers violated requirements that they provide passengers with food, water and a chance to exit an aircraft that has been on the ground for more than three hours.

But there were airline horror stories. Passengers on board United Kingdom-based British Airways and Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. flights were trapped for hours after landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport while crews struggled to locate empty gates and immigration officials.

Those travelers’ experiences will be factored into the coming consumer protections, Transportation Department spokesman Bill Mosley said last week. The proposed rules broaden the number of airports subject to the three-hour limit for tarmac delays and require foreign carriers to draw up contingency plans for getting stranded passengers off planes at U.S. airports.

But it’s not clear that the rules would have helped the international passengers stranded at Kennedy, since the airlines, airport authority and federal security and immigration officials disagreed as to who was to blame for their ordeal.

“There’s questions and confusion about gate availability, and questions and confusion about the availability of customs officials to process the international passengers,” said Steven Lott, spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, which represents 230 airlines around the world. “The New York City situation makes it more difficult for the Department of Transportation to write their final rule because it clearly shows that there are many different parties involved here.”

There were only 15 total tarmac delays between May, when the rule first took effect, and December. That’s down from 584 such delays during the same eight-month period of 2009, according to the Transportation Department.

Federal data show that three flights sat beyond the 180-minute cutoff during December: Delta Air Lines Flight 1329, from Detroit to Miami, was delayed 192 minutes on Dec. 12; United Airlines Flight 147, from San Diego to San Francisco, was delayed 189 minutes on Dec. 27; and Pinnacle Airlines Flight 3829, from Detroit to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was delayed 186 minutes on Dec. 12.

No U.S. carrier has been slapped with fines for excessive delays, which can reach into the millions of dollars. Transportation officials are investigating 148 reports from carriers, consumers and the news media, Mosley said.

Critics of the rule question whether the threat of $3 million fines for typical narrow-body flights has noticeably improved air travel. There were 23,878 more flight cancellations in 2010 than in 2009, although the total number of domestic flights was down slightly last year, Bureau of Transportation Statistics data show.

“The on-time arrival rate for the industry was 79.8 percent in 2010 versus 79.5 percent in 2009,” said Bill Swelbar, an airline researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “My take is that the delay is still occurring, just not as much on the tarmac as possibly at the gate.”