Continuing its campaign against tarmac delays, FlyersRights.org last week issued an annual report that tags Delta as the worst airline when it comes to caring for passengers during tarmac delays.
The report also cites what the group says are lapses in the Transportation Department’s tarmac-delay reporting system.
"Delta Airlines is the recipient of the They Treat You Like Dirt Award as our members continue to complain about the service provided by Delta during an excessive surface delay [of three or more] hours," the report said.
The group’s founder, Kate Hanni, is suing Delta, alleging that the airline hacked her computer files. She declined to provide details or data to explain why FlyersRights singled out Delta in its report.
In the group’s tables ranking the airlines based on DOT data, Delta appeared to be the third-worst airline for tarmac delays of more than two or three hours.
However, in the table ranking airline delays of two hours or more by frequency, there appears to be a discrepancy in the way the information for Delta and AirTran is presented.
The table shows Delta with two delays in 686 flights and AirTran with two in 2,061 flights; all other ratios are expressed as one delay in some number of flights.
It was not clear if the discrepancies were typos, and Hanni declined to discuss them.
She also declined to respond to questions about the group’s listing of a dozen tarmac delays that it claimed had gone "unreported" by the DOT. At least five of those were international flights or flights by smaller airlines. The DOT database covers only domestic flights by the top 19 U.S. carriers.
Of the rest, the DOT online database shows that two of the flights were reported, although with lower delay times than reported by FlyersRights. In another two cases, the incidents were reported under related flight numbers.
In another case, it appears that the date of the flight was wrong in either FlyersRights’ or the DOT’s report.
Hanni would say only, "I am confident in our findings."
As for her group’s insistence that Congress limit tarmac delays instead of relying on DOT rules, she said: "Congress must pass comprehensive legislation so that any new administration cannot overturn the rule. I’d like to ensure that our children and grandchildren have basic human rights and predictability to their travel experience."