Originally Posted by
swanscn
It is time that airlines be held accountable for things that they control. If you were one of the ~12,000 or so passengers you would feel differently. And if they start cancelling flights they will loose more revenue then the fines they are attempting to avoid. IF a airline cancelled a flight for which they had no reasonable alternatives, I would request a refund. If they start cancelling for delays such as weather or ATC when these are not valid this will be found out quickly, and hopefully the fines for lying to everyone will be huge.
You can request the refund. But that doesn't do much good when you are on a discount ticket booked well in advance and you're trynig to get to a destination today. Getting $300 back when the replacement cost is $1000 is a pretty bad deal for the consumer.
Yes, I'd be annoyed if stuck on a plane for 3+ hours. But I also can see the bigger picture and feel that the alternatives - which are being put into play already - are worse overall for the consumers. As for finding out that the airlines is lying about the cause of the delay, I'm not really sure how that would happen. If the airline says the delay is weather how are you going to disprove that?