By Tom Stieghorst | South Florida Sun-Sentinel
September 13, 2007

Airline passengers who have been stranded on the tarmac don't easily forget the experience: Planes become hot, humid and smelly. Food may run out. Babies are inconsolable.

The inability to get off such flights has led a coalition of consumers to stage a "strand-in" next Wednesday in Washington, D.C., to drive home the need to address the problem. The protest includes a 28-foot makeshift plane made of plywood rigged to simulate the conditions stranded passengers often endure.

Zane Kelleher, a retired Eastern Airlines pilot from Fort Lauderdale, plans to attend. While delays are sometimes inevitable, he said, discomfort is not.

"You don't have to disembark passengers to make the level of comfort tolerable," he said.

Long, drawn-out ground delays are only one of the air travel issues that have surfaced in this year of crammed planes, lost baggage, weather-driven cancellations and overbooked flights. But because they are so dramatic, aviation regulators are taking notice.

Next week's strand-in, organized by the Coalition for Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights, is expected to be attended by hundreds of people who have been stranded over the past year.
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