How would you like to spend 3 hours in a plane on the ground, waiting for either takeoff or your gate after landing? Yeah, I wouldn’t either. Yet this is the length of time American Airlines kept aircraft waiting in over two dozen instances between 2013 and 2015.
American was fined the whopping sum of $1.6 million for a total of 27 incidents in which tarmac delays exceeded the established DOT rule of three hours (which still seems really long). The only exceptions to this rule are reasons of safety and security. The sum of the fine matches the amount one levied against Southwest Airlines in 2015.
February 16, 2013 saw the worst of the incidents, which involved 20 excessively-delayed flights at Charlotte Airport. A winter snowstorm wreaked havoc on AA’s logistics, causing massive delays. A total of 860 passengers were left sitting on planes for over 3 hours.
Had I been one of the unfortunate people trapped on a plane for three hours on the ground, I would be ticked. I understand that delays happen and that air travel can be unpredictable, but sitting on the tarmac for over three hours is unreal! Reimbursement for the cost of the flights is the minimum compensation I would expect from American (in reality, they would probably tell me to go pound sand).
Outcome of the DOT investigation
The DOT investigation concluded that mismanagement of resources and poor decisions during foul weather caused the excessive delays. Mismanagement also caused recent problems for Frontier (SEE: The huge problem flying Frontier). Contrasting three hour delays with large numbers of canceled flights, I’m not sure which is worse.
The total $1.6 million won’t actually be paid to the DOT. American is receiving a credit of $600,000 for passenger compensation and another $300,000 for equipment to help them prevent incidents like these from happening again. But they’ll certainly be writing the DOT a check for the rest.
American was ordered to “cease and desist” from future violations. Because American is not exactly paying the entirety of the fine and been slapped once by the DOT for these violations, I hope they will be more cognizant of passenger well-being in the future.
Header image courtesy of Simon Sees, via Wikimedia Commons under CC2.0 license.
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
I sat on the tarmac for over three hours at DTW back when it was a nw hub. Never again.
Ugh that sounds horrible 🙁
I’m out of CLT an AA hub and I switched to delta because 30 min or greater tarmac delays occur on the majority of aa flights here but never 28th delta
“28th” was typo should have been “with”
We (my wife and I and our four children) sat on the tarmac for 4 hours on a Cathay pacific flight in Hong Kong because they couldn’t permission to land at our destination in Shanghai. They served the meals on the ground. The pilot finally gave up at about 9:30 pm after four hours and delayed departure to the following morning when he couldn’t get any assurance that we would be able to leave before 1 am. Cathay provided a hotel for the night but otherwise no further compensation. Given that it was not their fault, I didn’t think that this was unreasonable.
It was pretty much a nightmare for us as the rolling delays meant that I couldn’t cancel our hotel in Shanghai until too late so we had to pay for that hotel night. Then one of our children left their carry on airside, so we had to wait 2 hours for that to clear back through security and customs, and during that time, our 12 year old wandered off and got lost for about 10 minutes (let me tell you, that is a very big airport with a lot of people in it). By time we got to the hotel, it was 1 am and they got us all out of bed at 6 am to go back to the airport. All in all, not one of our favorite travel days.