Airlines Cancelling Flights to Avoid Fines

By -
Dec. 27, 2010: Snow removal crews work to clear runways at Philadelphia International Airport. A powerful East Coast blizzard menaced would-be travelers by air, rail and highway, leaving thousands without a way to get home after the holidays and shutting down major airports and rail lines for days.

Airlines managed to keep their on-time rate for December flat with year-ago results despite severe weather and a higher rate of flight cancellations, with carriers scrubbing scheduled flights in part to avoid costly tarmac delays.

Cancellations in December rose to 3.7 percent of all scheduled flights for the 18 largest domestic carriers, versus 2.8 percent in the same month last year, according to data provided Thursday. The on-time rate for the month was 72 percent, the same as a year ago.

“Airlines are pre-canceling simply to avoid a potential tarmac delay,” said Terry Trippler, a travel analyst at consultancy Rules to Know.'

Starting in April, airlines face fines of up to $27,000 a person on aircraft sitting on a tramac for more than three hours. Lawmakers passed the rules following a string of horror stories of passengers being stuck on planes for long periods of time without food, fresh water or clean lavatories.

Pre-canceling flights have helped airlines avoid such costly fees, but it has also provided some benefit to fliers. With the use of social networking Web sites and text messages, airlines have gotten better at keeping customers up to date on their flight status.

“If they are notified of a cancellation early enough, they don’t even have to go to the airport,” Trippler said. “The only problem is that because of heavy load factors, you don’t always have a flight to get out on right away.”

Load factors among major carriers, which reflect how many seats are purchased on an average flight, have been at record levels for the industry following two years of seat capacity reductions.

Source : http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2011/02/11/airlines-cancelling-flights-avoid-fines/#content

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?

By -
Image
Researchers are proposing a frequent flyer tax to pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the airline industry. A new paper from the International Council on Clean Transportation proposed the tax as a way to fund some of the $121 billion that needs to get invested every year to decarbonize flying. "Varying the levy based on flying frequency focuses the tax burden on wealthier frequent flyers and helps ensure that people with lower incomes are not priced out of air travel because of climate policy," the study's authors, Xinyi Sola Zheng and Dan Rutherford, wrote. A sliding fee for flights beginning at $9 for the second flight and $177 for their twentieth in a given year would raise $121 billion -- versus a flat tax of $25 per ticket for all flights. For the study's authors, the tax is a way to avoid penalizing people in lower income brackets and shifting the load to the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population. Not only would the revenues come from wea
Read more

Autonomous aviation startup Xwing hits $400M valuation after latest funding round

By -
Image
  The safety pilot has his hands off the controls during an Xwing demonstration flight. Image Credits: Xwing Xwing has scored another win two months after it completed its first gate-to-gate autonomous demonstration flight of a commercial cargo aircraft. The company said Thursday it has raised $40 million at a post-money valuation of $400 million. The company is setting its sights on expansion — not only tripling its engineering team, but eventually running regular fully unmanned commercial cargo flights. Xwing has been developing a technology stack to convert aircraft, including a widely used Cessna Grand Caravan 208B, to function autonomously. But it’s had to solve a few problems first: “the perception problem, the planning problem and the control problem,” Xwing founder Marc Piette explained to TechCrunch. The company has come up with a whole suite of solutions to solve for these problems, including integrating lidar, radar and cameras on the plane; retrofitting the servomotors that
Read more