The Department of Transportation revealed last week that it is investigating whether airlines are realistically scheduling aircraft and providing on-time performance statistics, as required by law, to consumers.
Questioned at a House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation hearing about the best way to improve airline customer service, DOT Assistant Secretary for Aviation and International Affairs Andrew Steinberg told Congress of the two investigations.
"We want to understand how it is possible that a flight could be late 70 percent or 80 percent of the time, and that information is not disclosed," Steinberg said in testimony reported by TheStreet.com.
Scovell also noted that "continuing to operate chronically delayed flights could potentially constitute a deceptive business practice, and not disclosing such delays could be viewed as contributing to a deceptive practice."
DOT has just begun this investigation and a spokesperson could not estimate how long it may take.
Officials are alarmed by the rise in delays. For the first two months of 2007, DOT reported that "nearly one in three flights (31 percent) were delayed, cancelled, or diverted, affecting approximately 22.8 million passengers," an increase over the same period in 2006 when only 23 percent of flights so impacted 16.6 million passengers.
"The average delay was 54 minutes--over 3 minutes longer than those for the same period in 2006," DOT reported. Flight cancellations nearly doubled to 41,115 during this period.
"The number of flights that were chronically delayed (by 30 minutes or longer), diverted, or cancelled 40 percent or more of the time increased by more than 400 percent over the same period in 2006," according to DOT's report. Bureau of Transportation Statistics data during this period also revealed a nearly 136 percent increase in the number of flights, to 11,889, experiencing tarmac delays of one to two hours; a 570 percent rise, to 67 flights, in those with four- to five-hour delays; and a 700 percent rise, to 24, in those of five hours or more.
For consumers, the frequency and severity of delays may be even worse, according to FlightStats vice president of business development Meara McLaughlin. The DOT tracks only 19 carriers and excludes flights operated by code-share or commuter partners of the majors. FlightStats compiles flight operations data for "99.8 percent of all scheduled flights" by route, carrier and airport. FlightStats also tracks on-time performance whether carriers change departure times or flight numbers. Within DOT's methodology, such changes reset the on-time performance, she said.
Also testifying before the subcommittee, DOT Inspector General Calvin Scovell III mentioned an investigation into whether airlines are disclosing on-time performance statistics. "Currently, the airlines are required to disclose on-time performance only upon request from customers. However, the information that the agents provide about on-time performance through the airlines' telephone reservation systems is not always accurate or adequate. In 41 percent of our 160 calls to the airlines' telephone reservation systems, agents either told us that the information was not available, guessed what they thought the on-time performance was, or gave the data for only the previous day," Scovell testified.
Several published reports indicated that this investigation may lead the DOT "to issue fines against as many as eight carriers." A DOT spokesperson said the department was much further along in this investigation and expected "disclosure soon." However, he could not define "soon."
The hearing was scheduled as Congress debates both the scope and funding levels for the Dept. of Transportation as part of its reauthorization that expires Sept. 30.
In his testimony on airline customer service, Scovell noted that "DOT should take a more active role in airline customer service issues" and that "airlines must not only refocus their efforts to improve customer service," but must "overcome challenges in mitigating extraordinarily flight disruptions" like the February storms that left thousands of passengers stranded on tarmacs for hours.
"The book is still open on this issue. We will continue to look at the situation," said Jim Berard, director of communications for the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee. "If the airlines won't clean up their own act, some type of regulation might be necessary," he added. Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., is opposed to the "level of minutia" that would regulate seat pitch or the size of the bag of peanuts.
In his testimony, Steinberg said, "The department strongly prefers that the airlines address customer service issues rather than the federal government, but sometimes outside action may be necessary."
Asked this week whether the National Business Travel Association has a position on passenger rights and customer service issues, executive director Bill Connors said, "Not an official one. We're not going to be leading the charge for dramatic passenger bill of rights legislation. I think we'll come out with something that largely lets the marketplace solve this issue as long as there are some basic customer service standards that airlines live by and make sense to everyone: food, water, medical attention, etc."