What the hell is wrong with BDL?
 

Jetblue, AA....planes were stuck on the tarmac for HOURS on Saturday. BDL says it wasn't equipped to deplane AA because it was an international flight. So what about Jetblue? NO GATES AVAILABLE? They couldn't bring buses to get people off the plane for more than 7 hours???

Those of you whose base is BDL—how is this airport run? What is wrong with these airport employees?

All I'm hearing about is anger with Jetblue. What about Bradley Int'l Airport?

It's a small airport, they sent 23 flights there on diversions pretty much all at once.

In a snow storm

With the power coming on and going off, so they could not get the jetways to work. Since the storm, through to now Windsor Locks has 100% (every single customer) without electricity. Yet they kept sending planes there.

They did not have the people to escort the people off the planes during the snow storm, they did not have customs to get the people off the CDG JFK flight off the plane (though I still don't get why they can't put them in a room instead of leaving them on the plane)

There's nothing wrong with Bradley on a day to day operation. It's when the FAA starts sending planes there without any consideration as to the conditions on the ground and the airport operations.

Really what on earth were they thinking, clearing a flight from Boston to Newark to take off only to have them divert to Hartford?

Ok....So the FAA sent these planes to BDL, an airport than can't even transfer people from plane to terminal in under 7 hours. So why isn't the FAA being blamed? Why isn't BDL taking responsibility as well? Why is the focus solely on Jetblue?

They are not just focusing on JetBlue, both the DOT and the FAA will investigate their procedures (which is the real issue, the pilot can only do what they are told to do, it just happened to be a JetBlue plane this time)

U.S. officials are looking at JetBlue Flight 504 and “several other” flights in which passengers may have been stranded more than three hours, the Transportation Department said in a statement today. The Federal Aviation Administration said it is conducting a “comprehensive review” of how the air- traffic system responded to the inclement weather.

The Port Authority in New York has no problem blaming the FAA -

Some flights were diverted during the storm because of “intermittent problems with the FAA’s ground-based air traffic control systems” at New York’s Kennedy and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty airports, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said in a statement.


though having the pilot say on the radio to the tower and rebroadcast all over the news

“We can’t seem to get any help from our own company,” the pilot said in an air traffic control recording posted on LiveATC.net. “Is there any way you can get a tug and a towbar out to us and get us towed somewhere to a gate or something? I don’t care, take us anywhere.”


will make people assume the blame lies with JetBlue. The news doesn't report facts, they report for ratings. The JetBlue flight had several sports writers flying up for the Miami game, so they were able to call it in realtime with the right people and present just the one side. There will be plenty of blame to go around, most with the FAA but after tonight the story will go away and people will only remember it was a Jetblue flight.

Yup, that quote has been going around. But I'm wondering about the context of that statement. Was it that Jetblue couldn't get BDL to open some gates? Was it because Jetblue corporate had no control over how quickly BDL gets buses to Jetblue flights to get people to the terminals? I would have liked to have read what kind of help Jetblue's corporate couldn't get for its planes.

That is unfortunately all true.

What has already been said upthread applies, but add in a blown weather forecast and current road conditions: It seems every 3rd road has a tree and/or power line laying on it. If you're lucky, there's one lane open, if not you reroute. Also, employees are probably dealing with their families w/o power, heat and other basics. (As I type this, it's on a laptop with about 33% battery power in a 48 degree room. Still waiting for Ready-Kilowatt to return after 48 hours of AWOL)

This is far from anyone's fault here. Multiple factors lead to a unique situation unlikely to be repeated.

I agree w/reft and cordelli. BDL is normally a wonderful airport... people come there to avoid NY and BOS. However, the snow came in earlier than expected ... and power went out for most of the northern tier. We are all trying to survive but there are issues with gasoline supply, food, power, etc. It looks like a war zone.

CL&P said they expected to have full power restored to the airport and by 3 this afternoon, and they will not have to depend on the generators.

Not that it helps the weekend flights, but as the power was cutting in and out, the generators apparently did not function as expected.

There was also an expert on the radio this morning, missed who it was. He was explaining why part of the blame lies with the airlines. He did not say all the blame, he did not say how much. I am not saying I agree with him, just saying what he said.

He said that in the flights involved on Saturday, none of the pilots declared an emergency. Had the pilot declared an emergency, a totally different set of rules would have applied and the outcome would have been different.

Granted, one would assume that some point between landing and seven hours in a snowstorm with no food and water and bathrooms, somebody on the ground would have kicked it up a level even if the pilot never used the word emergency.

The AA flight was from Paris. When it was diverted to Hartford, which is supposed to be an international airport but where Customs/Immigration officials are not really required very often, it was held awaiting Customs inspection. The inspectors likely had to come from JFK and were stuck in the snow like everyone else.

All that AA might have done is send the plane someplace else, like Chicago, if they had enough fuel. But once you hear about a 'diversion' - all bets are off. They were totally taken by surprise.

I don't know anything about the Jet Blue flights.

P.S. BDL is not really that small!

A few more details from Reuters

Flight 504, directed to a remote area of the airport on Saturday, could not access the terminal due to diverted planes that subsequently arrived and crowded the gate areas, Dervin (JetBlue spokeswoman) said.

"It got boxed in," Dervin said.

She said JetBlue flights were diverted because of navigation problems with airport navigation equipment in New York and New Jersey.

The Federal Aviation Administration, responsible for air traffic control, said in a statement it was looking into Northeast airline operations, diversions, procedures and airport equipment performance during the storm.

JetBlue said it could not say whether the decision to send certain flights to Hartford with the brunt of the storm heading for the region was incorrect.

Congestion, not weather, Dervin said, was the reason for problems at the airport where JetBlue planes are sometimes sent to refuel or wait, if there are delays in New York.

Other JetBlue flights were diverted to Atlantic City and Richmond, areas hit by the storm but not debilitated by it, Dervin said.

A good read from the Wall Street Journal site today about the sequence of events that led to so many planes ending up at Bradley.

How Snow (and Libyan Soldiers) Led to Airport Logjams

If fills in some information (assuming it's all factual) as to what went wrong and why so many planes ended up there.

This article shows clearly that airports need to be held to the same financial penalties as the airlines for delays of more than 3 hours. What is it....$27,000 per person that Congress mandated to be charged solely to the airlines? Time for airports to be included in these penalties to give THEM incentive to get people off the planes. ^

I fail to see what BDL did wrong here. Seems to me like they did the best the could in light of the circumstances.

Any one who boarded a plane for a northeast destination that day was taking a serious chance of having this happen. The wise thing to do would have been to delay the trip for a day or so.

I don't think there was much more they could have done given the current standards and practices. I think, or I hope, they will use it as a learning experience so that should something like this ever happen again they could maybe make things better, like getting the toilets cleaned and more food and water like Delta apparently managed to do.

I know there are people who believe the folks at Bradley should have had a plan in place for over two dozen planes being diverted from Newark and Kennedy without notice as a major storm rolled in early causing power outages and 1,500 people seeking shelter in their unheated terminal where the only food was what was left at a McDonalds in addition to those stuck on the planes, and international planes being diverted there they could not handle all in two hours.

The reality is I don't think any airport would have such a scenario in their disaster plans. If they did something like this in a movie, there would be threads about how impossible that would be to happen, how no airport would allow that, what a stupid movie, etc.

In the end, lets hope they learn enough to keep from repeating it, but it's pretty senseless to try and assign blame for something nobody could have predicted.

If the article has correct information in it, then BOS should also be bearing the cost of some of the fine levied against BDL, not to mention New York area ATC.

Start fining the airports and the next time, BDL will just say "Sorry, send your plane somewhere else, not here" and then no one is a winner.

This was a corner case cause by a freak event that was outside of the control of most parties. It wasn't a chronic situation that no one was attempting to resolve that needed a trip behind the woodshed.

99.9% reliable systems cost a whole heck of a lot more than 99% systems and so on. Given the rarity of these events, it'd be more cost effective for the airport to just pay the fine each time, than perform the upgrades and maintain the new equipment to get another 9 on the uptime.

They didn't fine USAir or Sully for landing in the river (at least as far as I know) -- This case doesn't warrant fines either. Learn from it, and move on.

One has to wonder as they were diverting planes this morning because of the fog in LaGuardia if the passengers and crew were going nuts saying please, don't let me still be here till tonight, any airport but this one. :D

A couple of senators are trying to get some action on the tarmac delays, asking the DOT to actually impose fines on airlines (to date, no airline has been fined even though there have been delays, which is not a shock, there are way too many loopholes in the rules), and explain why there have not been any fines yet.

From their press release

Nov 11,2011 - Boxer, Snowe Urge DOT to Enforce New Rules on Tarmac Delays

Recent 7-Hour Tarmac Stranding Highlights Need to Enforce Penalties Under DOT Rules

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) sent a letter urging the Department of Transportation (DOT) to diligently enforce the agency’s rules on tarmac delays, which include fines against airlines that violate regulations on extended tarmac delays.

dot dot dot

In the letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Senators Boxer and Snowe wrote, “While the rule has been successful at reducing these incidents so far, it is troubling that even though there have been several cases in which extended tarmac delays have occurred, so far no fines have been levied against airlines that have violated the rule. In circumstances where the airline was in fact the cause of an extended tarmac delay we are concerned that if the rule is not enforced, we risk having more incidents such as the recent extended tarmac delays.”

The Senators asked the agency to provide updated information on other incidents where violations may have occurred. Senators Boxer and Snowe also pointed out that their legislation includes a key consumer protection the rule does not – a requirement that airports have contingency plans in place to prevent extended tarmac delays – and asked the DOT to review whether this requirement could have helped the stranded passengers on Jet Blue Flight 504.

A bit of info from JetBlue

JetBlue Airways met with U.S. transportation officials this week over why five of its flights were diverted to Hartford, Connecticut and 550 passengers were stuck on the ground for hours during October's freak Northeast snowstorm.

dot dot dot

``Nothing was resolved - and we didn't expect anything to be resolved. The DOT will continue their investigation on their own pace and we will participate as requested and needed,'' JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin said.

The U.S. Transportation Department declined to discuss Tuesday's meeting with JetBlue operations personnel.

And the lawsuits have started

Syracuse, NY -- JetBlue is being sued in Syracuse by passengers who got stuck on a tarmac in Connecticut while flying to New York City and New Jersey during a snowstorm that socked in much of the East Coast in late October.

The suit is filed here because the United State District Court for the Northern District of New York is a bit less congested than some others, said Peter Cambs, of Parker Waichman Alonso LLP, which filed the suit. Cambs said the suit could be filed anywhere JetBlue does business.

JetBlue landed six planes at Bradley International Airport, outside Hartford, Conn., during the storm, according to the lawsuit. Passengers were stuck on the plane for more than seven hours, as water and food supplies ran out, toilets failed and "rolling power outages" left passengers in the dark, the lawsuit says.

One of the plaintiffs "suffers from anxiety, depression and claustrophobia," the lawsuit says. She was unable to get to anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications which were in her stowed luggage.

There was an article today in The Hartford Courant: http://www.courant.com/news/connecti...,7177828.story

The plane crammed with hundreds of passengers Oct. 29 could have been accommodated at other airports if airlines had known so many flights were going to Bradley, Babbitt said. Instead, travelers were stuck on planes, some for more than seven hours, after 28 flights were diverted to Bradley because of weather and equipment problems at New York area airports.


Gee, you think?

What the hell is wrong with New York airports? :D

Fixed?
 

Fixed?

http://www.masslive.com/business-new...lan_shoul.html

As reported, the plan will address the short comings that led to issues when 29 planes got dumped on Bradley during the October storm
- creating a new sterile area with 2 refurbished gates in the unused terminal B w/bathrooms & supplies.
- better and backup communications
- Policy changes from all the 3 lettered organizations to allow this

Also reported was the plan was put into effect during a diversion during a January snow storm

Terminal B is supposed to be torn down and replaced, funding permitting, so this is temporary, but it's temporary to the extend that the state doesn't have the funds for the terminal B project either.

I think having a drive by gate to get people off a plane is a great solution, hopefully something other airlines will also consider. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, even an area they can move a stairway up to the plane and just walk people inside, move the plane and do the next one.

Hopefully good will come out of it and it can be implemented in other airports, though of course the real solution is to not send too many airplanes into the same airport, no matter what the weather is.

My conjecture is they are using the entire Terminal B so they can lock down International Passengers. I'd go further and say that if they had one international flight in there already, they would probably divert the any domestics to Terminal A and hope there's a gate.

I think that was the communications part of the plan.

I'm not confident there but I wouldn't mind being wrong. BDL happened to have Terminal B lying around. I don't think there's too many airports that have that 'luxury' so to speak. The plan itself and the compromises that all the 3 lettered organizations had to make might bode well though, towards some future sanity. Likewise for the communications part of the plan -- these days few folks seem to have viable disaster recovery plans. They're on paper, but I don't know how many survive first contact with reality.

I personally find BDL easy. Not crowded and such.

Why is BDL SOOOO much more expensive....especially than PVD?
I'm flying out of PVD for Jul4....driving from Hartford, parking, and am going to save almost $250!
BDL is NOT competitive lately. They're milking their "convenience" to the extreme.

Maybe the previous post should be a new thread -- this thread relates to last year's winter storm diversions to BDL.

Simple

Because they can.

People are more than willing to pay the extra not to go to the other airports.

That and JetBlue is rarely the most competitive on price to most of its destinations. And if there is ever and IRROP it's really just hope for the best.