Airlines Put Safety Ahead of Good Will
By Steve Jordon and Stefanie Monge, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Apr. 11–This week’s thousands of canceled American Airlines flights come at a “turbulent and intense time,” when the air travel industry faces high fuel prices, consumer dissatisfaction and a possible general recession, an Omaha aviation expert said Thursday.
An American Airlines spokeswoman said, meanwhile, that the airline would restore at least some flights between Omaha and Dallas-Fort Worth as soon as possible, maybe today or Saturday, as it finishes inspecting its Boeing MD-80 aircraft.
People scheduled to fly on American should check www.aa.com, go to the ticket counter at Eppley Airfield or call the airline’s reservation number, spokeswoman Andrea Huguely said. The airline also is offering refunds and reimbursement for other expenses to travelers affected by the more than 2,400 flight cancellations nationally over the past three days.
American canceled all 20 of its scheduled flights between Omaha and Dallas-Fort Worth on Wednesday and Thursday. At an estimated 100 passengers per plane, some 2,000 people over the two days saw their Omaha-related travel plans change.
“Rest assured, we are working very diligently to try to get as many aircraft back in service as possible,” Huguely said. “I know it’s been very frustrating for the customers there in Omaha.”
Also Thursday, Midwest Airlines canceled about 20 flights while it inspected its 13 MD-80 airplanes. Flights to and from Omaha were not affected, but some Omaha travelers’ connecting flights in Milwaukee may have been canceled, spokesman Mike Brophy said.
Brophy said he expected all the aircraft to be back in service this morning. Federal Aviation Administration inspectors had examined some of Midwest’s MD-80s and cleared them for travel, but Midwest decided to use its own personnel to examine the rest of the aircraft.
Airlines risk losing customers’ good will by canceling flights, said Brent Bowen of the Aviation Institute at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, but they would risk even more by not taking action because maintenance and compliance are in the forefront of the industry right now.
The safety emphasis, raised in Congress and through the FAA, which regulates the industry, comes on top of what Bowen said is a sense of pessimism and confusion among industry representatives about the economy and how to compensate for rising fuel costs in a way that will not agitate consumers.
“There’s nowhere else to cut,” said Bowen, who commented after a meeting Thursday of representatives from airlines in North, Central and South America, including major U.S. airlines, in Panama City, Panama.
The industry’s biggest concern is what will happen if the United States goes into a recession because of “extraordinarily high oil prices,” Bowen said. Airlines need more money because they are losing money with every traveler.
As long as the airlines continue to let people fly for under cost, the industry will be in crisis, he said.
Two-thirds of the 5,000 people who responded to a Web site questionnaire on airline quality thought it was getting worse, Bowen said. The institute’s annual quality report, issued Monday, rated the industry’s 2007 performance as the worst since the ratings began 18 years ago.
Bowen said the quality ratings will not improve until the airlines can consistently make solid profits.
He said some quality ratings data will be updated quarterly because the industry is changing so rapidly and there is so much uncertainty.
This week’s flight cancellations are costly, too. Huguely said American hoped to have 130 of its MD-80s in service by 4 p.m. Thursday, 210 of them by 4 p.m. today and all 300 by Saturday evening.
“We will not put an aircraft back in service that has not been fully blessed by the FAA,” she said.
Because the Omaha flights go to and from Dallas — American’s main hub and home to the most MD-80s in its fleet — there’s a good chance that some of those flights would be restored sooner than flights on some other routes, she said.
American booked as many passengers as possible on other aircraft or on other airlines’ flights, she said. Some Omaha passengers found seats on Southwest Airlines flights to St. Louis, American Eagle regional jets to Chicago or United Airlines flights to Denver, making connections to other destinations.
But some didn’t wait.
One man paid $250 Friday morning for a rental car to drive to New Orleans, said Toreng Moss, a lead agent for the National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car office at Eppley Airfield.
“He has to get there,” despite the high price of gasoline and the one-way rental cost, Moss said.
Over the past two days, the office has rented about two dozen cars for one-way trips out of Omaha — an unusual number, she said. She also expected one-way rentals to arrive in Omaha, driven by people whose flights were canceled in other cities.
“They’re depleting our fleet,” she said. “We’re going to have to get those cars back, especially in time for Berkshire Hathaway,” the May 3 annual shareholders meeting that draws thousands of visitors to Omaha.
One motel near Eppley housed between 35 and 50 “distressed passengers” from American over the past two nights. They used American vouchers to pay for rooms and meals.
A team official with Round Rock, the Austin, Texas, baseball club playing a series with the Omaha Royals, found a flight to Des Moines on Wednesday and rented a car one-way to Omaha, said Tom Borgmann, manager of Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s Eppley office.
Two travelers called Thursday to say that their early morning arrivals in Omaha were pushed back to 11 a.m. because they found flights on other carriers, Borgmann said.
The Baylor softball team, which was scheduled to arrive in Lincoln, had its flight canceled. The Bears are now scheduled to arrive Saturday evening, and Baylor and Nebraska will play a doubleheader Sunday beginning at 1 p.m.
American Airlines’ inspections were done to comply with an FAA directive on the bundling of wires in the aircrafts’ wheel wells, the airline said.
Huguely said the airline’s inspectors corrected the placement of some of the bindings on the wires to comply with the FAA directive.
“If there was anything found to be not in full compliance, then it was fixed,” she said. “And it is fixed before the aircraft is ever put back in service.”
Some officials said inspection-related disruptions will spread to other airlines as federal regulators step up their by-the-book review of how airlines comply with maintenance and safety orders, the Associated Press reported.
“If we do uncover any safety issues from these audits, the carriers will have to make a business decision as to how to deal with the issue,” FAA spokesman Les Dorr said.
By Steve Jordon and Stefanie Monge
This report includes material from the Associated Press.
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