Three Hour Rule

By now you’ve probably already seen the news about the new rules for airline tarmac delays on some less obscure channel than this, but in case you missed it, Congress has ruled that airlines can no longer delay passengers by having their aircraft sit on the tarmac for more than three hours, and must provide food, water and restroom facilities in the event of such a delay. If this sounds completely absurd to you, or more to the point, if the idea of companies that depend on repeat business in order to stay in business violating not only the Rules of Business and Common Sense but in fact the Geneva Conventions and several Federal laws by effectively falsely imprisoning their passengers under such conditions for longer than six hours seems completely ridiculous to you, don’t worry. This merely indicates that you are still sane…

A much better question, at least from where I’m sitting, is why one airline or another hasn’t already jumped on this issue in order to gain a competitive advantage, the way Southwest did with the baggage fees issue. When the other major carriers started charging extra for checked baggage ($15 to $25 for the first bag, and often $25 to $125 for the second), Southwest immediately started advertising the fact that they were not going to institute any such fee, and have since developed television commercials (complete with jingles and choreography) that capitalize on the fact that their competition has rather stupidly decided to annoy the public. It seems obvious that someone could launch the same sort of campaign regarding tarmac delays and the three hour rule; either pledging not to do this sort of thing (unless necessary for safety or security reasons, of course) or bragging that anyone subjected to this delay will be given food, drink, free toys, frequent-flyer miles, or indeed anything else you can obtain for cheap…

The really beautiful part of such a campaign, you see, is that the airline doesn’t actually have to take any action; they just have to convince the public they are going to. If you use fast turn-around times as a key part of your business model the way Southwest does (it’s how they manage to provide so many flights each day with relatively few airplanes; their aircraft spend the smallest possible amount of time on the ground) you can already advertise having the shortest flight delays and the fewest of these day-long tarmac delays of anyone in the business. All you have to do now is convince the customer that the potential cost of the “free” services you’re promising in the event of a tarmac delay are so high that you couldn’t possibly afford to pay them out with any frequency, and the rest is just writing ad copy…

Now, I don’t want to suggest that misleading the public into thinking that you’re going to take care of them when you have no intention of doing so is an acceptable way of doing business. If you advertise added services in the event of a tarmac delay you must be ready to provide them; and if you promise to do everything possible to eliminate such events, you should be prepared to do exactly that. And if it really isn’t possible for you to do anything about such events under your present business model, well, then I’d have to recommend you start making changes as soon as possible. Because the few dollars that extra services will cost, or even the few thousand dollars that de-boarding the passengers and starting over when you can get the flight on its way successfully would cost, are going to be small potatoes compared to the millions of dollars in fines that the FAA is going to charge you for leaving even a single large plane filled with passengers waiting on the side of the runway...