Ablang wrote:

At least 4 jets strand Conn. passengers for hours

The story now reads that 6 Jetblue planes were diverted to Hartford,
carrying a total of about 700 pax.

17 planes from other carriers were also diverted there, but no reports
if they were de-planed or not.

Jetblue suffered major PR dammage back in 2007 when they stranded pax on
a plane for 11 hours.

The media is reporting that it costs carriers a lot of money to de-plane
pax at airports where they don't normally operate from. Aside from any
off-airport costs (ie hotel rooms) I'd like to know just what those
costs are.

You would think that your constitutional rights are being violated by
being held captive in a plane like that. The PAX should have called the
police and claimed that they were being held captive inside a confined
space against their will at Bradley.

=========
JetBlue Flight Pilot Pleaded for Help During Tarmac Ordeal

http://www.670kboi.com/rssItem.asp?f...temid=29747249

The pilot of a JetBlue plane stuck on the tarmac for seven hours full of
increasingly angry and frustrated passengers pleaded for assistance from
airport officials, telling them he "can't seem to get any help from our
own company."

"I got a problem here on the airplane, I'm gonna need to have the cops
on board," the pilot said, according to cockpit recordings posted
onLiveATC.net. "There's a cop car sitting in front of me right here
right now. I need some air stairs brought over here and the cops brought
on board the airplane.

"Look, you know we can't seem to get any help from our own company, I
apologize for this, but is there any way you can get a tug and a tow bar
out here to us and get us towed somewhere to a gate or something," he
said. "I don't care. Take us anywhere."

ABC News has learned that the Department of Transportation's Aviation
Consumer Protection division is investigating the delay involving
JetBlue Flight 504, as well as a couple of other flights, that occurred
Saturday.

If the government determines any airline violated the tarmac delay rule,
that carrier could be fined as much as $27,500 per passenger.
===========

Every time I hear about this, I have to wonder why pilots don't have
more power or common sense during contract negotiations to have
iron-clad agreements in their contract that they can force their carrier
or the airport they land at to de-plane passengers at their request.

Pilots seem to have a lot of authority over their plane and how they
operate and fly it, but this fundamental issue of being demoted to
hostage status on their own plane during events like this and why they
tolerate this state of affairs is a mystery.

And why the airport refused a direct request by the pilot to tow the
plane to a gate and de-plane the passengers needs to be looked into.

Obviously all the layers of this rotting onion weren't examined and
taken into account when the gov't passed the tarmac-delay rule.