The Cookie-Baking Airlines Promises it Won't Strand Passengers

Would America's top-rated airline allow passengers to sit on a tarmac for up to 10 hours?

Highly unlikely, says Carol Skornicka, vice president and general counsel of Milwaukee-based Midwest Airlines, which has been voted the No. 1 airline in the country five consecutive times by Zagat Air Travel Survey.

"But it would be irresponsible if I said it could never happen," she said in a phone interview last week. "Ice storms occur. And there are planes whose wheels have actually frozen in ice and would not move."

Skornicka says there have been instances where Midwest planes have had to sit on the tarmac for several hours. But she says it's "extremely rare" and that she "can't imagine" Midwest's gate agents and/or pilots allowing an aircraft to sit on the tarmac for 10 hours, as an Aruba-bound JetBlue plane did during an ice storm at New York's JFK International Airport two weeks ago.

Eight other JetBlue flights sat on runways for six hours or more during the storm.

American Airlines recently announced that it won't hold passengers on grounded planes more than four hours. Skornicka says Midwest -- whose motto is "Best Care in the Air" -- doesn't have a specific policy dealing with delays on the tarmac. But she says it does empower its pilots, gate agents and flight attendants to make individual judgments depending on the situation and how greatly passengers are being inconvenienced.

"Sometimes three hours is too long" to be sitting on the tarmac, she says.

Skornicka notes that JetBlue CEO David Neeleman has publicly apologized and admitted the delays were unacceptable.

"JetBlue didn't have proper procedures and systems and trained people in place to be able to respond to that bizarre snowstorm," she says. "So their whole system melted down.

"And frankly, it's something we might have predicted, watching how fast that airline has grown."

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