NEW YORK - More than a dozen planes sat on the tarmac for more than three hours in June, the government said yesterday. It’s the second month in a row that the number of three-hour delays reached double digits since a government rule went into effect over a year ago aimed at limiting them.
The Department of Transportation said 14 planes were stuck on the tarmac for over three hours in June.
There were 16 such delays in May. There were only 20 in the full year before that. The rule threatening millions of dollars in fines for delays of three hours or more was implemented on April 29 of last year.
DOT hasn’t fined an airline for violating the rule, because it says that none of the delays was serious enough to justify the big penalties.
Nearly all of them were caused by bad weather.
The recent uptick in delays could draw fire from passenger rights advocates who first pushed for financial penalties.
Most of the delays this June were at Chicago O’Hare and Washington Dulles. The longest was a flight from New York that was stuck on the tarmac in its destination city - St. Louis - for four hours.
