The following op-ed appeared in yesterday's New York Daily News. Thought you guys would enjoy. Brian http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/273854p-234548c.html Air travel must change By DAVID ROWELL Even on a good day, air travel is bad - and it's getting worse. Flight delays are spiraling out of control. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reveals that a fifth of all reported delays extend over an hour. One in every 10 flights in the first 10 months of last year took more than an hour just to get from the gate to being cleared for takeoff - the highest rate of delays ever. Airlines now have no slack in their operations, so when the slightest thing goes wrong, such as bad weather or a few workers calling in sick, they can't absorb the problem. The result: Your flight is delayed or canceled, while your bag goes somewhere else and, as we saw over the holidays, your vacation turns into a nightmare. The airlines are at war with everyone, except perhaps their own high-paid executives - passengers, staff, their retired workers. With so many airlines in bankruptcy, and most of the rest making worrying financial noises, you can't be sure if there'll even be an airline to fly you between when you pay for a ticket and when you get to the airport. It's time for a Passenger Bill of Rights. Last time things were this bad, Congress threatened passenger-rights legislation, and the major airlines ended up agreeing to self-regulation. But it is plain the industry has only changed for the worse. Some airlines - New York's own JetBlue, for example - show us what an airline should be, and prove, by their profitability, that it is possible to combine fair ethical treatment of passengers with business success. As for the rest - they've shown they can't be trusted to treat us fairly. A Passenger Bill of Rights would simply give airline passengers the rights other customers have when buying other things. If an airline takes your money, it should be obliged to provide the flights and services you've paid for. Delays in getting you to your destination would be compensated for on a sliding scale; minor delays get you small refunds, and major delays entitle you to a full refund of your ticket price. Baggage delays would have a similar sliding scale. To prevent nightmare situations where passengers are trapped on planes for hours while still on the ground, airlines should be required to get clearance from air-traffic control before loading a flight. Passengers who spend more than an hour in a plane on the ground, for any reason, would be given compensation based on how much longer than an hour they remain trapped on the plane, in addition to compensation for the inevitable delay that is occurring. There is no pressure on the airlines or the Federal Aviation Administration to make our airways more resilient to bad weather, and a subjective evaluation that a delay is due to a maintenance problem frees the airline from any obligations to its passengers. Both these exemptions should be removed. Someone has to carry the can, and there's no more effective lobbying group than the airlines. If delays directly cost the airlines, they'll apply pressure on the FAA to minimize the delays. The airlines should be required to provide and staff toll-free customer service numbers and to answer their customer service calls as quickly as they answer their regular reservation calls. But wouldn't such a guarantee be very costly and push fragile airlines into insolvency? Only for the very worst-performing airlines. Currently, almost 80% of flights arrive within 15 minutes of their promised time, and if penalties were applied on a sliding scale to flights more than one hour late, the financial impact on most airlines and airfares would be low. Airlines save money by canceling flights and make unrealistic promises about schedules. Making them liable for their performances would switch this around to penalize bad behavior, while rewarding good behavior. Wouldn't you be happy to pay perhaps $5 extra for your ticket to know that your flight and luggage will arrive as promised and that if something goes wrong, the airline will fairly compensate you? A Passenger Bill of Rights will encourage the airlines to improve their game and will give us fair recourse when things go wrong. Rowell writes and speaks frequently on the airline industry and has a Web site/newsletter, The Travel Insider. Originally published on January 23, 2005