Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

> Now, the Trump administration may roll back a rule that requires airlines to give passengers such as Hill the option of getting off a flight that is delayed too long on an airport tarmac. And that's not the only regulation that might be weakened or scrapped.

With or without this rule, I could never quite grasp how it wasn't tantamount to kidnapping? At least within a "reasonableness test."

Obviously if you're at 10K feet, and ask to get out, reasonably the airline cannot comply. But if you're sitting on the tarmac of an airport, there's no reasonable argument for why they cannot de-board people after a two or three hour delay. It fails the reasonableness test.

Before this rule was introduced airlines did this a lot. Several people literally set off the escape slides trying to get out, called 911, or got arrested for asserting their rights. Is that really something we want to return to?

I get that this administration is anti-regulation, but this was a hugely dehumanising situation before that isn't legal in other countries for just that reason. I'd hope if they do remove it individual states step in to re-instate it immediately.

View on HN

The issue is with luggage I guess. The leaving passengers luggage will have to be removed for safety as it could be dangerous. If you don't board but they already started loading luggage your bag will also be unloaded again. So the aircraft would have to taxi back to a gate where the passenger and their stuff can be unloaded, delaying the flight even further. Which might make even more passengers want to disembark

> The leaving passengers luggage will have to be removed for safety as it could be dangerous.

I really do hope all luggage gets inspected /before/ anyone boards the plane.

I collected those TSA inspected slips when I was flying through SFO a lot. However I did not get one every single time. I suppose time does not allow manually inspecting every 40 pound piece of luggage every passenger brings. Plus luggage does have less strict rules about what you can have in them as opposed to hand luggage which makes it a bigger risk all by itself

It's not a time issue, there's just no need. Radiation-based screening is sufficient most of the time. Physical bag searches happen when the radiation-based screening indicates something or when it cannot produce a clear image. Bags may also be randomly "selected" for a physical search.

The majority of checked baggage is screened without the need for a physical bag search.[0]

[0] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening

That would only be a reasonable concern if a terrorist could determine in advance which flight is going to be sitting on the tarmac for a few hours.

Unfortunately, it is realistic to assume that they can, because they can make a flight sit on the tarmac for a few hours. It's not that hard to get an insider in who can do that.

I'd say the real objection here is that planes are not all that special as a place where people gather. The reason planes (legitimately!) require extra security and concern is that they are flying missiles. (Even the ability to divert a plane is, at a national scale, not really that interesting.) If they aren't flying, they aren't really that interesting of a terrorist target.

Okay, that's a good point.

But given the number of terrorists that are willing to die from their cause through a suicide attack, it still seems like there's a very tiny risk of a terrorist organization going through all of the trouble to have their agent sneak a bomb on board through checked luggage and board the plane, then arrange for the plane to be held on the ground long enough to allow deboarding for their agent to sneak off the plane.

It seems much simpler to just find a fanatic that will go down with the plane. (and through his death, it makes it harder to track down the exact people involved in the terrorist network)

This is true for fanatic terrorism. But there are other threats, from more politically based terrorism, where suicide bombings are less common, to things like extortion.

Still, if someone is not wiling to die for their cause, are they willing to get on a plane that they planted a bomb on and trust that their organization will come through and stop the plane before it takes off?

Seems much easier to just bribe an airport worker "Hey buddy, I'll give you $5000 if you put this bag of "drugs" on flight 1234"

They always have this option. The balance you have to find is: After how long of a wait is the benefit for society of being able to leave without removal of the luggage worth it compared to the enlarged risk of attacks.

It clearly isn't "you can do this all the time", because then you would not need to pay the 5000$, or have the risk that that buddy rats you out. I'm not sure I want to be responsible to find the right amount of time.

Most terrorist are fine with sacrificing themselves though. So why would they try to get off?

Most? Do you have data on that?

Not a tarmac.

https://aerosavvy.com/aviation-terminology/

Not a tarmac.

https://aerosavvy.com/aviation-terminology/

That could be fixed though. If the Airline let the luggage go the final destination, they could charge (maybe $100) to return the luggage once it arrives at the destination. This would also decentivise people from trying to deboard unless it was really important.

This does not solve the problem GP has raised.

If getting off the plane early while it's on the ground is valuable, why not charge for it? That way people who really do want to get off can? It's hard to say that deboarding early is a right, because that would imply your rights change if you were in the air or not.

I think gp's concerns would be addressed by making this transaction legal and letting passengers and airlines arrive at a fair price.

wow and they would lose it half the time for sure, no thanks

That's called PPBM (Positive Passenger-Bag Match). However, PPBM is not required on US domestic flights. I had a few occurrences where I checked my bags several hours before my flight and had those bags arriving before me (on an earlier flight) at my destination airport, waiting for me in the airline's luggage office. The TSA relies on screening every bag to prevent incidents, rather than assumptions-based reasoning.

There is a PPBM requirement for international flights though, including those leaving from the US. While security is the reasoning behind it, I suspect that customs and immigration compliance also play a role.

Yeah the airlines don't like to let passengers back off the plane because boarding the plane takes so long.

But rather than the fix the root of the problem of why boarding takes so long(because nobody wants to check bags any more because fees), their solution is to repeal regulations that let people off the plane in the event of an extreme delay.

Chronic delays actually have an impact on the economy as a whole in loss of productivity. But the greater good never seems to be of interest any more. And here the concern is only to the airlines bottom line.

> because nobody wants to check bags any more because fees

I hear this a lot but is there any truth to this? I would think the chance of loss and breakage is a much bigger problem than a few dollars. Aside from clothes and perhaps shoes there's little I am willing to risk checking in. And then again: my tshirts are carefully collected (I no longer wear conference tshirts) and would be hard to replace. My shoes and sandals are comfortable on unusual feet and can hold my arch support inserts well and it's unfeasible to replace them in a foreign city. Even in my base cities it takes a hell of a time to buy new footwear.

I'm sure both reasons contribute.

I plan all trips to be checked baggage free if possible.

You get charged more, the TSA and baggage handlers will steal and damage things, and it can add a lot of extra time for the airline to get the luggage to the carousel.

I am always just stunned about how ppl in the US fly mostly without luggage checked in because there are so many disincentives to do so.

People are absolutely trying to about baggage fees now, with the result being overhead bins being packed to the brim and causing delayed when people's stuff won't fit and had to be gate checked.

For a $300-400 ticket, baggage fees can amount to 10-20% of the cost of ticket so many people are in fact motivated to avoid the fees.

Ryanair used to be one of the worst for passengers avoiding the luggage fee. With flights costing as little as £5, but luggage being about £20, that's no surprise.

But last month, I flew Copenhagen-London with only an ordinary backpack. My print-at-home boarding pass clearly showed[1] that if my bag was larger than a normal backpack (i.e. too big to fit under a seat), it would probably be checked in at the gate during boarding.

With everyone aware of this, I saw no arguments, and boarding the plane was orderly and fast. There was a trolley for the gate-checked bags to be put on, as we walked to the plane.

[1] https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/useful-info/help-centre/faq-ov...

For me it's a time thing. Assuming the checked bag arrives, you now have to wait at luggage claim to get the bag. This can end up taking a lot of time.

If your bag is lost, now your entire trip has blocks of wasted time trying to retrieve the bag.

The fees are only a small part of why I refuse to check bags.

Tangent aside, it's quite true - no one checks bags due to the fees and airlines are disinclined to enforce their rules. Last time I flew in the US I got into a near fight with a guy who was allowed to bring 3 large carry-on bags onto a fully packed flight and start to smash his bag against mine to make it fit. He did not respond to my objection well.

Now this is a case of an ass being an ass, true, but he refused to allow the attendant to check his bag because of "fees"; whether or not you pay them at that point is kind of irrelevant as it's the fear of the fees that get people riled up. Personally I'd be fine with the fees, but the airlines also mistake customer service with just not enforcing their own rules. So people who do pay fees or pack more appropriately end up getting screwed and those who try to skirt the fees bother the rest, and the airlines don't seem to care either way.

I don't know what the difference is with US domestic and EU International, but during my time abroad, I've never had this issue, but I've also noticed that the attendants for non-US airlines have no problem enforcing the rules.

So from my experience, it's just a matter of US Domestic flights trying to do as little as possible to be a service provider while charging the same as any other airline normally would. Even Aeroflot is better than US domestics.

Most European airlines have limits on the size of luggage you can take onboard. If you have baggage that is larger than the limit they’ll make you check it in, and charge you the airport fee which is a lot higher than if you booked it when you bought the ticket.

Well, US domestic flights do too (it's more generous than EU carriers I believe), but still limited. However, my point was more than during my time in various EU countries and Russia, this limit is much more carefully enforced, especially on crowded flights.

Domestic US carriers never seem to enforce such limits for whatever reason, and it's a personal annoyance. I'm a nerd who follows the rules and packs as light as possible for travel, so part of this is just annoyance that others don't have the same courtesy, but it really is frustrating based on my traveling experiences to see how much more you can get away with on US flights in terms of bending the rules.

>"I hear this a lot but is there any truth to this?"

Yes. In fact its not uncommon for flights to run out of overhead bin space before the plane is fully boarded. The carriers have now started offering premium boarding which ensures that you will have access to overhead bin space.

It has less to do with the thread of losing checked bags and more to do with the now standard $25.00 per checked bag fee that nearly all US carriers have.

Even if checked bags was free. And somehow there wasn't the precedent of damage.

I still wouldn't until they improved delays at final destination when you want to leave and have to wait.

Also it's still seemingly too common that bags are misplaced or lost for a little while.

A big motivator for me is the time it takes to both check a bag and retrieve it. I never check a bag for work travel, even though this is when I'm the least price sensitive. clearing customs without bags saves even more time.

I’m seeing a lot of comments here agreeing that it’s the fees, but I wonder how many consider that checking bags adds at least 20 minutes of walking to & waiting at the claim. If I can manage it, I’ll always opt to carry my bags, fees or not.

> (because nobody wants to check bags any more because fees)

I don't check bags because it is a huge hassle. Being able to walk off the airplane and right of the airport is nice. Not worrying about lost luggage is nice. Not spending an extra, worse case, 20-30 minutes at the airport is nice.

Airplanes that board back to front also load a lot faster, but people think it is "unfair" that people in the back get to go on first.

Heck all sorts of different loading patterns are better than the "front to back" system most often employed now days.

>Obviously if you're at 10K feet, and ask to get out, reasonably the airline cannot comply. But if you're sitting on the tarmac of an airport, there's no reasonable argument for why they cannot de-board people after a two or three hour delay. It fails the reasonableness test.

Here's a quote, I found, describing the 2009 Rochester incident. The flight was re-routed due to thunderstorms, landed at 1230AM, and the airport was closed. With the airport closed and thunderstorms, I wonder if safety was a concern.

> Continental Express Flight 2816 was en route from Houston to Minneapolis carrying 47 passengers when thunderstorms forced it to divert to Rochester, where it landed about 12:30 a.m. The airport was closed and Mesaba Airlines employees — the only airline employees at the airport at the time — refused to open the terminal for the stranded passengers.[...]In the morning they were allowed to disembark. They spent about two and a half hours inside the terminal before reboarding the same plane to complete their trip to Minneapolis.

[0] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34127317/ns/travel-business_travel...

tangentially related - the safety of ground crew in thunder storms is a real concern, but why do we need to have humans involved in bringing a plane or pushing back from a gate? We're desperate to have fully-automated vehicles on our streets but we can't build a robot that moves a plan 50 feet in a controlled environment?

Unions perhaps?

Every problem anywhere in the world is unions isn't it? I don't think unions have the same power in every country. And in some countries they have enough power to ensure that workers get retrained.

Wait! I've been in this exact situation in 2015.

Internation flight Philly to Doha. Plane sat on runway for 3 hours. Burned too much fuel. Returned to the gate to refuel.

I had already missed my connection window, so I told them I wanted to get off the plane. 8 minutes later the Air Marshalls came to get me, and off I went in a hurry.

I could see this framed as a useless regulation because of the free market's invisible hand which will take care of this by having customer focused airlines NOT holding the customers hostage and gaining more market share. Same as with net neutrality. But the thing is that from time to time people forget that the airline industry is actually a cartel.

Return to the gate (is one available? probably not) burning thousands of dollars of extra fuel, disrupting the gate schedule and inconveniencing perhaps thousands of other passengers to allow one person to disembark? Sounds unreasonable to me.

Also there is an upper bound on this sort of thing because crews have duty hour limits. They are not allowed to take off if they will be over the limit before they land, so there's only so much time they can spend waiting on the ground before they know they aren't leaving today, at least not with that crew.

The plane shouldn't be leaving the gate if it's not planned to depart in the next half hour. Shuffling passengers from "relative" comfort in a terminal vs. putting them in a hot box for hours without the ability to go to the restroom, is wrong. Arriving planes can deplane people, back away empty if they aren't leaving soon instead of filling up with their next cargo, allow other planes to arrive and deplane, and idle WITHOUT human beings for the sake of a little fuel cost savings.

They do it because they can mark the plane as "departed on time" if it pushes back from the gate with the passengers.

This may be a large part of it, but its a reasonable approach for the airline to take. By "departing" on time they are showing that they did their job, the actual delays are FAA / Airport problems....so airlines view is "why should we take the blame" because airport ABC is incompetent.

Except that the airlines are often part of the problem.

If you didn't know anything about airlines, and just looked at historical on-time data for airports for the last decade or so, you'd think Newark had some major operational issue and just couldn't handle flights, because it was one of the most chronically-delayed airports in the US.

But the reason for the delays wasn't a problem with the airport's operations; it was a problem with United, which has a hub there. At the time all of the big traditional carriers in the US were expanding the use of higher-frequency flights on smaller jets operated by regional affiliates (as opposed to lower-frequency mainline service, which is more expensive for the mainline carrier). But United under Jeff Smisek's leadership went well beyond what anyone else was doing, and ended up pushing Newark to its absolute limit in terms of capacity. Result: traffic jams at the airport producing endless delays.

United should not be allowed to shrug and say "it's the airport's fault" in that case.

A similar thing happened in Dallas more recently; after the American Airlines/US Airways merger, AA switched to running DFW as a banked hub. The term comes from having "banks" of large numbers of flights arrive and depart almost simultaneously, rather than smaller clumps of flights arriving and departing throughout the day. In theory this is more efficient; it reduces the number of passengers with multi-hour waits between flights, requires less staff to handle flights during downtime between "banks", and helps maximize the use of the aircraft. But while US Airways had experience running banked operations, AA largely did not, and their staff at DFW simply weren't able to pull it off. Result: chaos at DFW, with flights landing and then having to wait 30-40 minutes for a gate to open up, and passengers missing their precisely-timed connections because they were still sitting on their inbound flight when their outbound flight pushed back.

While airlines love to complain and say it's the airport's fault, the number of genuinely capacity-constrained major airports in the US is surprisingly small. Poor scheduling and operations at the airlines are much more common causes of these problems.

There has to be accountability if passengers are stuck on the tarmac for hours. You can't have one party saying 'I did my job' and the other saying 'I did my job' but the passengers are still sitting there.

Better to make the party with the most control responsible and have that propagate through the supply chain. If the airports are causing airlines to miss metrics or receive fines, the airlines should be putting pressure/changing routes until the airports improve. If everyone is just twiddling their thumbs then the fines aren't large enough.

If the consequences of letting people off the plane are dire, the airlines will work harder to ensure the situation doesn’t occur in the first place. There is no good reason for passengers to be forced to sit on a grounded plane for hours. If no gates are available, use stairs.

> If the consequences of letting people off the plane are dire, the airlines will work harder to ensure the situation doesn’t occur in the first place. There is no good reason for passengers to be forced to sit on a grounded plane for hours. If no gates are available, use stairs.

Weather can screw things up...

Weather screwups can be mitigated with contingency plans.

Dealing with weather is part of the business. Airlines need to have a better way of dealing with it than keeping passengers stuck on a grounded plane for hours.

weather is pretty repetitive and can statistically be determined.

Or you know just come up with a "plane is parked safely" rule that lets people go pee. from what I understand once the plane has rolled back, it's technically taxiing which means you have to be in your seat and belted.

As one pilot said "we're not moving faster than a city bus and we're not in traffic. Busses have people crammed and standing up to and over the yellow line. But that would be considered unsafe in a plane."

Taxiing speeds are 16 to 19 kn (wikipedia). Busses go fater than that AND accelerate (up or down) faster than a plane at those speeds.

And I honestly do not care. That is the airlines problem.

>"disrupting the gate schedule and inconveniencing perhaps thousands of other passengers to allow one person to disembark? Sounds unreasonable to me."

I'm sorry where did you get the idea that this has anything to do with allowing "one person to disembark."

The Tarmac Delay Rule referenced in the article and referenced in the OPs comment prevents airline's from keeping passengers on the tarmac for greater than 3 hours[1].

It seems pretty reasonable to let people back into the airport after 3 hours of sitting in a cramped seat on the tarmac.

[1] https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/new-dot-consume...

> I'm sorry where did you get the idea that this has anything to do with allowing "one person to disembark."

Presumably from the "kidnapping" talk in someone1234's comment. I also interpreted at one or a small number of people wanting to return to the terminal at the price of additional delays for everyone else.

Everyone wants to come back to the gate.

Source: myself being stuck on tarmack for 2 hours 45 minutes with 180 people, no AC, and “seatbelt on” sign (no way to get up to stretch your bones)

This doesn't contradict my comment.

> But if you're sitting on the tarmac of an airport, there's no reasonable argument for why they cannot de-board people after a two or three hour delay. It fails the reasonableness test.

This kind of thing happens when the plane is in line waiting to get de-iced in a storm. I'm just a layman but I think what can happen is that the off-boarding/on-boarding process will add so much time that it will either delay the de-icing of other planes (if they end up waiting for you) or add extra time to the process such that the anti-ice chemicals lose their effects by take-off time.

De ice the plane before people board.

IIRC the extra delays can make the de-icing lose its effect enough for it to not be safe to fly anymore.

absolutely - I've been delayed, then further held up while they apply more deicing fluid. Stupid Canadian winters...

De icing fluid is only effective for a set period of time

> Holdover Time (HOT) is the length of time an aircraft can wait after being treated prior to takeoff. Holdover time is influenced by the fluid dilution, ambient temperature, wind, precipitation, humidity, aircraft skin material, aircraft skin temperature, and other factors. If the Holdover Time is exceeded the aircraft must be re-treated before takeoff.

> Also there is an upper bound on this sort of thing because crews have duty hour limits

This isn't generalizable, but I have a friend who's a flight attendant at Southwest. They only get paid for time when they're literally flying. Getting on/off the plane and up into the sky from the tarmac are unpaid time at work.

paid hours and flight hour limits aren't the same thing. The FAA says flight time starts when the plane moves under its own power. So once it moves away from the gate, even if it's just to sit on the tarmac, it still counts as flight time.. and pilots have a limit on the amount of flight time they can log.

Yeah, that's not what happens though. Airlines have a strong incentive to put you on the plane and push back from the gate even if they know the flight will not leave for hours because it makes their "on-time departure" number look better.

Depending on the flight, a "taxi" time long enough to trigger the three-hour rule is already a major waste. Remember that not every plane has its tanks fully topped up every time it lands, and that every minute the plane spends with its engines running prior to actually taking off is a minute that it's burning fuel.

I've been on flights that had to return to a gate to refuel because they spent long enough on the ground after pushing back that they could no longer reach the destination. In at least a couple of cases the long delay was predictable from conditions at the time boarding began, but the airline went ahead and literally burned money in pursuit of closing the door on time.

There is nothing anywhere on an airport that is properly called "tarmac".

Stop using the term.

https://aerosavvy.com/aviation-terminology/

"I could never quite grasp how it wasn't tantamount to kidnapping"

Because the customer may have agreed to this in the terms of the ticket (which very few people actually read)?

I think you should not have the ability to force "rules" on your customer, or they should be able to select "reject custom rules and proceed with what laws say" option.

As a customer you never get anything from those rules and have zero leverage over them. Let's just say no.

I thought it was not possible to sign away fundamental human rights like this.

If, as you say, "very few people actually read" these "terms", then they aren't even actually part of the contract.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com