Here's yet another story involving airline travelers being abandoned on an airplane for hours without any good reason or rationale. After a harrowing flight from Denver to Chicago the plane was diverted to Gary, Indiana. Now Gary is basically a suburb of Chicago, located 30 miles southeast. How does it make any sense to force folks that just experienced one of the worst flights of their lives, to sit on a plane for SIX HOURS because of the slight hope that they might be able to take off again, fly 30 miles and attempt another landing in Chicago. It's simply incomprehensible. Let the people off; give them a $50 travel voucher; put them on a bus to Chicago; and they would have all be happy and home (or at O'Hare figuring out their connection flight details) within the hour.
It's amazing to me that we don't have the right to exit a plane that is stuck on the ground for this length of time. I mean ok, maybe an hour or two of sitting there, maybe even three, but anything beyond that seems like false imprisonment to me. Yet, the airline industry has blocked efforts in congress and the courts to allow the implementation of state or federal "Passenger Bill of Rights," that would provide this right. So once again, we, the traveling public, remain captive, literally, to the business decisions of the industry.
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