Segment 3 Of 3 Previous Hearing Segment(2)
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AIRLINE PASSENGER RIGHTS, H.R. 700, H.R. 780, AND H.R. 908
Thursday, March 18, 1999
House of Representatives, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Aviation, Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to recess, at 11:00 a.m. in room 2167, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John J. Duncan, Jr. [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
Mr. DUNCAN. The meeting will come to order. Welcome, everyone. This is the second day of hearings on airline passenger rights. Last week we heard compelling testimony from witnesses regarding the many difficult experiences that they have had with the various airlines. This week, we are pleased to have several members of Congress, representatives of the Air Transport Association, Northwest Airlines, and the Department of Transportation testifying.
I want first of all to compliment Northwest Airlines on their willingness to testify. The issue we are discussing, treatment of aviation passengers, has become a very emotional issue. We also did issue invitations to, I suppose most of the other airlines. I think the Air Transport Association will represent the remaining airlines.
I do not want to make a long opening statement, since this is a continuation of our hearing from last week. However, there was one point made last week I would like to emphasize. Airline passengers have certain expectations when they purchase a ticket that says they are to fly at a certain time to a certain destination. The passengers expect to arrive at their destination relatively on time.
In the case of an airline delay or flight cancellation, I think the best thing an airline can do is provide as much information to the passengers as possible. The more information a passenger has, the more they can adapt to the situation.
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I think, as I said last week overall, the airlines are doing a good job, most of the time. But we are trying to do something about the more egregious situations. I think everyone, no matter what their job is, should always have the desire to improve and get better. We are trying to help find the ways in which airlines can improve their services to passengers without of course totally re-regulating the airlines. In fact, I think if we do some of these things, we possibly can forestall what might become many calls to drastically re-regulate. I do not think any of us want that.
Also, I know last week when we heard about the situation with Virgin Atlantic who held some people on a plane for seven and a half hours when they were hooked up to the gate, and would not even let them move around, and did that when all they had to do was open up the door to the plane and let them walk around the terminal, that was a pretty ridiculous situation, in my opinion. We want to make sure things like that do not happen in the future.
I want to compliment once again Chairman Shuster for really leading the charge on this issue, and bringing this to the forefront. At this time, I would like to recognize Chairman Shuster for any opening statement he has.
Chairman SHUSTER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I had a rather lengthy opening statement last week, so I am not going to repeat that. There is some additional information that we were able to gather between last week and today, which I would like to share with the committee. For example, according to the Department of Transportation, last year there were 3,613 planes delayed out on the tarmac, on the runway, for more than two hours. So the Detroit horror story was not an aberration, but it is a problem that is being experienced.
Of course, last week we also heard some incredible accounts of people being mistreated by the airlines. I again emphasize my dismay at the extent to which people are coming up to me and telling me their horror stories. I can not go through a day without somebody stopping me and telling me of a horror story they have. I am very hopeful that the airlines are not going to have their head in the sand, and are going to appreciate that this is a growing, serious problem.
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In fact, DOT has confirmed to us that in 1998, there were 26 percent more complaints per 100,000 boardings. So that, too, shows this is not simply an anecdotal matter, but a very statistically significant increase in complaints.
I would emphasize that my bill is only a starting point. Congressman Dingell and Congressman DeFazio both have bills. The Administration has a bill, there is at least one bill over in the Senate. So I think we should work, and we should work with the airlines to see to it that we come up with something that everybody can live with and that will indeed help the traveling public.
One point in closing I would like to emphasize, because I was a bit critical of one of the airline executives last week who I believe provided me with misleading information, when he said the 26 percent increase in complaints was only a January to January figure. That of course is not the case, the 26 percent increase is a 12 month figure, an annual figure.
But I did go back and check January to January figures. And the complaints this January were up 243 percent over the same period of last year.
Now, I am sure much of that is related to the very bad weather we had in January. Nevertheless, I would like the record to show that fact.
With that, I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I look forward to hearing from our witnesses.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I now turn to our very distinguished ranking member, my good friend, Mr. Lipinski.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you, Chairman Duncan.
I simply want to say that I want to associate myself with the remarks of Chairman Duncan and Chairman Shuster. I look forward to the presentation of the witnesses before us today, and I yield the balance of my time to the ranking member of the full Committee, Mr. Oberstar.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I compliment Chairman Shuster on initiating this series of hearings, and Chairman Duncan for his judicious as ever conduct of these hearings.
There is a great deal of anxiety among the traveling public, among our colleagues in the Congress, including concerns among editorial writers, about the condition of service in the Nation's airlines. The Duluth News Tribune just this week in my district, not noted for being critical of industry or business, starts out saying, there was a time when people who traveled by air returned from their trips with tales of their experiences visiting far-off places. No more. Now they often return with tales of woe about their experiences dealing with the airlines.
When the airlines were deregulated 20 years ago, and at this point, it is hard to see the benefits of the move aside from lower fares, itself at times unpredictable from some places. The flying public more often sees a general deterioration of customer service, as only a few airlines survive the sorting out. No wonder service has deteriorated. Certain carriers are virtually free of competition in numerous locales.
Well, when we deregulated the airlines in 1978, the Congress did not intend to end the Government's responsibility to protect consumers against deceptive practices or against inadequate service. It was our intention that the Department of Transportation should continue the authority of the Civil Aeronautics Board to protect consumers.
Those intentions were very clearly spelled out in the committee report of this committee, which I submit for the record, because I think it is very instructive. I would like to read just a couple of lines. The Civil Aeronautics Board has promulgated regulations protecting consumers in such areas as over-booking, denied boarding compensation, limits on liabilities for lost or damaged baggage, smoking, discrimination against handicapped, terms of charter service, and the notice that airlines must give passengers of contractual terms between the passenger and the carrier.
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It goes on to say an important pending proceeding involves consumer protection and protection of airlines against unfair competitive practices, including the Board's rulemaking to establish standards for computer reservation systems.
[The material follows:]
[Insert here.]
Mr. OBERSTAR. Those words were written 21 years ago. We have repeatedly held hearings on one or another aspect of those problems. And the hearings that we held last week and hold today again coalesce, congeal, bring all together in once place, the concerns and problems of the traveling public.
Make no mistake about it, deregulation has saved the traveling public $12 billion a year. But new low fare entrant carriers saved 100 million passengers $6.3 billion in just one year. And the answer to much of the woes that we are hearing today is competition, not necessarily more regulation. As I said at the outset of this set of hearings, the carriers have to clean up their own act. The Department has to be vigilant to assure that there is competition for carriers, because competition is the best way to assure that they clean up their own act.
But believe me, if monopolistic practices, if we in deregulation traded Government control of market entry and pricing for private sector monopolistic control by corporations of market entry and pricing, then the Government must re-enter that arena and make those decisions in the public interest. That may well be the outcome of these hearings.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Oberstar. Full statements of members will be placed in the record. For any brief comments, we will go first to Mr. Sweeney.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Chairman Duncan. I want to commend you and Chairman Shuster for conducting these hearings. As Chairman Shuster already acknowledged, there are a number of proposals already out there dealing with the issue of airline passenger safety. I think our goal today is to try to find common ground. I believe that Chairman Shuster's passenger bill of rights is a logical first step in that direction.
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For example, one of the provisions, a very reasonable provision, simply requires that the airlines be truthful when explaining delays. I do not think it is too much to expect or ask that honesty be provided as part of customer service.
The one point I would like to emphasize as we begin this process is that correcting these problems is not simply a matter of providing greater choices to passengers. Because as all of us know too well, some customers in certain parts of the country do not have those choices. it is not a matter of being able to go from one airline to the other if you're not happy with the service you're receiving. But I am very optimistic, and I think this is a great starting point.
I want to associate myself with the remarks of my distinguished colleagues before me. I am looking forward to refining H.R. 700 and I am looking forward to getting on with this important work.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Mrs. Johnson?
Mrs. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I appreciate that you're holding hearings on this important piece of legislation. The problems that arose most notably in Detroit and other lesser-known but no less important instances deserve our attention. The American flying public is starting to feel more and more neglected by the airlines when they fly.
I would like to take a moment to talk about a subject that I am very much concerned with, and that's code sharing agreements. The global aviation marketplace has become so competitive that the major U.S. carriers have found it advantageous to enter into alliances with carriers around the globe. I am very worried that as the number of alliances continues to grow, airlines will begin to enter into agreements with airlines lacking the safety standards that we have come to expect in the United States.
The demand for air service to Asia and Africa has become more and more prevalent. Yet the airlines in these regions do not yet operate with adequate safety. I was alarmed when I read the article in the March 7, 1999 Washington Post regarding code sharing agreements. With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit the full text of this article into the record.
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It has troubled me for some time that many passengers are not informed when a different carrier will be providing service for part or all of their flight. The article brought to bear a situation that faces many fliers. Passengers should not have to fly blind without knowing the safety records of the airlines they choose.
According to the article, if I were to book a flight from my home airport, Dallas-Fort Worth, into National Airport at Taipei, Taiwan, I would be booked on American Flight 691 to San Francisco, where I would board American Flight 6123 to Taipei. But it is not really American Flight 6123, it is actually China Airlines Flight 3.
China Airlines, even though it is allied with American Airlines, that I trust thoroughly, and even though my ticket would show this as an American Airlines flight, does not have the same safety record as American Airlines. I trust American Airlines to provide safe and effective service. However, according to the article, China Airlines has had three fatal crashes in the last decade, causing 465 deaths.
Further, China Airlines has had an accident rate per 1 million flights of 11.34 through 1996, while American has had a .15 rate. Continental Airlines, who is also in a code sharing agreement with China Airlines, has a .29 accident rate per 1 million flights. I have flown to Taipei on this very flight, and I can tell you that I would not feel comfortable in the second leg of my trip any more, after reading this article, only to see a strange marking on the airliner's tail.
I would begin to wonder about the airline's safety record, especially on an international carrier with which I am not familiar.
Mr. Chairman, I will submit my full text into the record, and I thank you very much. This is an essential hearing, and I appreciate all the witnesses coming.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Mr. Mica?
Mr. MICA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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I believe the bill before us is a good start. I of course spoke when we had the hearing last week to several issues that unfortunately aren't addressed in this legislation, but I'd like to see addressed. One is the treatment of our flying public with physical disabilities. It is not a part of this legislation, I think it should be a part of this legislation.
We demand even in our public buildings and other access that where the public travels or works, some accommodation for those with disabilities, for the sake of safety, for the sake of compliance with laws that we have, we must address the question of passengers with disabilities and their rights as pertains to their flying.
Another area that I see is in the bill and I am pleased to see is that it prohibits security screeners from separating babies from their parents. The other area that I have great concern about in passengers bill of rights is separating citizens from their civil rights. I think infringement on civil rights by the questioning, by some of the procedures that the airport goes beyond the bounds of the constitution, beyond the bounds of requirement. Most of it was instituted on a false premise relating to the TWA crash, the Flight 800 crash, when in fact that was a maintenance problem.
I am concerned that we do not have provision in this legislation or others that give the passenger a right to know about repetitive maintenance failures and conditions of planes, such as 737s, which I think we'll see a report next week on, where we have had repetitive failures, hundreds of people have died. I've asked for hearings on that matter.
I've also asked for the suspension of any flights, and FAA has that information, that does not have pilots trained in diversionary tactics and recovery tactics on the 737s that are still flying. What concerns me more is now passengers do not have the right to know in this legislation the maintenance and other repetitive mechanical failures problems of the planes that they're flying.
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Other than that, I am supportive of the legislation, Mr. Chairman. I thank you for this beginning and look forward to working with you and the industry and the committee.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Ms. Tauscher?
Ms. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I do not have any opening statement, I am looking forward to hearing from the witnesses, and thank you for these hearings. They are illuminating.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Dr. Ehlers?
Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I appreciate the opportunity to have another hearing. I've been reading the various bills submitted and also the proposal from the Administration sent by Secretary Slater. I believe we are beginning to see some daylight at the end of the tunnel in terms of effective approaches that could be taken without unnecessarily harming the airlines' performance or the service that they give.
So I look forward to hearing the testimony today. I hope that this testimony, combined with the previous, will give us some clear guidance on the way to go. Thank you.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Mr. McGovern?
Mr. MCGOVERN. Mr. Chairman, I just want to commend you for holding these hearings on this important issue. I'd like to ask unanimous consent to submit my statement for the record.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. All full statements will be placed in the record.
Mr. LaHood.
Mr. LAHOOD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am sorry I was not here for the hearing last week. I know that these hearings will illustrate and illuminate a number of problems that have occurred for passengers in the flying public. I'd like to just express a reservation that I have that we do not mislead the public into believing that if we pass a bill that we are going to solve the problems of information for the flying public. As Mr. Oberstar said, 20 years ago we deregulated this industry.
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I wonder a little bit if by considering a bill like this or passing a bill like this if we want Congress to get back into the business of regulating a fairly sizeable industry with so many people involved in it, and having the flying public believe that because we passed a bill that there aren't going to be delays and that they are going to get better information. I worry that we could be sending the wrong message here in the sense that because Congress passed a bill, now passengers have some sort of bill of rights that entitles them to something.
I do have a reservation about that.
Almost every weekend I fly home to my district. I fly into Chicago O'Hare. it is the busiest airport in the world. There is either a plane taking off or landing there every three minutes. I am always amazed at how efficient things work there.
But when they have a snowstorm or thunderstorm, things slow down. When the air traffic controllers have to deal with the lousy system that they have out at Aurora, and it breaks down, who's responsible for that? Well, in part, Congress is. I hope we are going to come up with the money eventually to put state of the art equipment at Aurora, so that pilots do not have to fly blindly into O'Hare.
Again, I have reservations. Because it is such a complex system, it involves so many people. I really wonder, I do not want the public to be misled by what we are trying to do here. I think it is great to highlight it and create an awareness. We are not going to pass a bill that's going to correct the ills of information, in my opinion. I just have reservations.
And I am very reluctant, sitting right in front of the Chairman, to make these comments as I am. I consider him a friend and a leader in safety and aviation and the highways and many other things. I consider him a friend and a real leader in transportation.
But I just have some reservations. Congress can not solve all these problems.
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And I would say one other thing. I was so irritated when the American Airline pilots took blue flu or however you want to call it, and I saw passengers sitting all over airports, all over the country, because they didn't like their contract or they were afraid they were going to have an alliance with some other airlines. Should we pass a bill telling American Airline pilots they can not do that?
How many people were stranded in airports over the holiday as a result of that? I think that's a problem, too.
But I just say that I do think we have the best system in the world. I believe it is safe, I believe Congress has been responsible for making it safe, from a lot of the things we have done. I think the airlines have tried to do what they can. But I think we are talking about an enormous task of information here and leading the public to believe that because we pass a bill, everybody's going to be satisfied. I think what we are going to do is create an opportunity for a lot of lawyers and lawsuits for people who believe they have a claim against somebody because they didn't get the right information.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. LaHood. We've had a large number of members show up here, and all members' full statements will be placed in the record. We do need to get on with our witnesses. But if anybody else has some brief remarks that they wish to make at this point, I'll be glad to call on you. Does anybody else wish to make a statement?
Mr. LAMPSON. Mr. Chairman, I hate to ask, but I want to take just a minute, please.
I want to thank you for the great hearings that are taking place. I look forward to working with the committee members. As a founder of the Congressional Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, I have a special interest of the safety and well-being of children on the ground as well as in the air. Up to 20,000 children age 11 or younger fly alone each day, which averages out to one unaccompanied child per flight.
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In today's world, more and more children are flying alone to visit their grandparents or to see divorced parents during holidays and vacations. That's why I was so pleased to see the issue of unaccompanied children addressed in some of the legislation before us today. Chairman Shuster's passenger bill of rights would direct the Department of Transportation to study and report back to Congress on whether the airlines are providing adequate supervision of unaccompanied minors on their connecting flights.
The Administration's passenger fair treatment initiative would require each airline to publicly disclose their plan and procedure for carrying unaccompanied minors, as well as any applicable charges related to their programs.
Last week we saw some disturbing footage from an investigative news report out of WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. The video showed unsupervised children left unattended by gate attendants. Other children were struggling to keep up with their airline escorts as they tried to make their connecting flights, because the escort walked several yards ahead of them without looking back.
We also heard some very difficult testimony from Tammy Rourke of Newberry, Michigan, whose son was molested while in the care of a major airline's unaccompanied minor program.
Saying all that, I do believe that parents have a role in ensuring the safety of their child when flying alone. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is in the process of preparing a pamphlet filled with guidelines for both parents and children to follow. Mr. Chairman, I'd like to introduce a copy of these National Center brochures entitled Child Safety for Unaccompanied Minors When Flying, and My Rules for Air Travel Safety into the record for consideration by the committee. I believe that this information will assist the committee as we continue to look at this very important issue. Thank you
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Lampson. That material will be included in the record.
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Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. Chairman?
Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Hutchinson.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think these hearings are very helpful. I believe they have indicated some of the concerns of passengers. But I think you have to put it in perspective. Deregulation has been mentioned, that occurred 20 years ago. What are the benefits from that? This week is spring break. Ordinarily I couldn't do it, but my family got to fly to Washington, reflecting the availability of air travel these days. Two hundred fifty-three million people flew in 1978, and 611 million last year.
And it is going to continue to rise. That's one of the benefits of deregulation, as well as prices declining 37 percent. That is the result of competition. If we can increase competition, then not only will consumers benefit from the decreasing costs, but also in an increase in service. I know this is an extraordinary issue with the airlines, because it is a competitive world out there. Poor service is going to result in declining passenger miles.
I think the big thing we have learned from these hearings is that information needs to flow freely. The airlines need to do a better job of communicating with their customers as to the reasons for any delays. We know that 60 percent of all flight delays are occurring because of the air traffic control system and the problems there, as well as weather.
So I think the leadership that the Chairman, Mr. Shuster, has demonstrated, as well as our chairman of this committee, who has done an outstanding job with the Air 21 bill and moving that forward, will ensure greater access by passengers to airports and an increase funds for adding airport mileage and runways. I think this is the right direction to go. I am delighted with it.
I applaud also the voluntary efforts of the airlines to improve passenger service, even though there are certainly additional steps that need to be taken.
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Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Dr. Cooksey?
Mr. COOKSEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to just make a couple of comments and then raise a couple of questions that perhaps our colleagues can address as they are going through their statements. First, has anyone ever looked at the airports, the efficiency of airports, and compared it with the efficiency of the cities within which that airport lies? I share the experiences of the Chicago airport, it is a very efficient airport and they do a great job. I think the city of Chicago runs well again.
I have had a couple of problems in the Detroit airport, how efficient is that airport. We go through Memphis frequently, and that airport is run well. I think the city government is run well. And I can say the same thing about Dallas, so I hope that question will be addressed.
I happen to know that in the Detroit case, they had a total white-out. They had snowdrifts that were so high that engines were blocked, the engines that are mounted under the wings were blocked and prevented the planes from being moved. I am a pilot. The times that I have gotten in trouble or gotten scared flying was when I took a risk in weather. In this particular weather, and last year there was not a single fatality in this episode of weather, there was not even a fracture. I think that's a good testimony.
That said, I do have a lot of confidence in the integrity and professionalism of the people at the FAA, the pilots that fly the planes. Maybe the management needs to become more friendly toward their flying public.
But I would like to get this reassurance from the chairman of this subcommittee and the Chairman of the Transportation Committee: If we go out, because we are supposed to be the source of all wisdom as politicians in Washington, but if we go out and pass some stringent regulation, can you assure me that there will be no comparable legislation proposed, enacted, signed into law, that will say that if a member of Congress fails to return a call to a constituent within 30 minutes, then we will have to personally respond or personally go see that constituent at their home or wherever? Or that if we fail to give a satisfactory response that that constituent can apply for a refund on their income taxes, because those of us who are members of Congress are not performing correctly?
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So if the two chairmen can assure me that no companion legislation of that sort will crop up, I might consider voting for the bill.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Dr. Cooksey. I can assure you that we know the airlines do a great job, but we know that no legislation we pass can make the system perfect. And I can assure you, we are not going to re-regulate airlines. But also, we always should be trying to make things better. We are trying to find a way to work with the airlines and work with the various groups and people involved to make our system better and to take care of some of these more egregious situations we are hearing about.
I think it is a good goal and a worthy goal. That's what we are trying to do.
Does anyone else wish to make a comment at this time? If not, I'll introduce the members panel. We are very pleased to have a members panel consisting of the Honorable John D. Dingell of the 16th District of Michigan, the Honorable Michael P. Forbes of the 1st District of New York, the Honorable Louise McIntosh Slaughter from the 28th District of New York. The members are listed in the order in which their willingness to testify came in. We will proceed in that order. we are very pleased to have the senior member in terms of service in this Congress, the Honorable John Dingell, with us. Mr. Dingell, you may begin your statement.
TESTIMONY OF JOHN D. DINGELL, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM MICHIGAN
Mr. DINGELL. Mr. Chairman, thank you. I will try and be brief.
Let me begin by saying, I am not here to ask for re-regulation. I am here to ask for competition. As you know, in the labors of Hercules, Hercules was given the job of cleaning out the king's stable. He finally had to divert a river through to clean it out. Obviously, the bills before you are not going to address the problem adequately and there is much more before this committee.
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I want to commend and thank Mr. Shuster, you, Mr. Chairman, and ranking members Oberstar and Lipinski. I want to say how pleased I am to be here with my two colleagues, Mr. Forbes and Ms. Slaughter, to discuss these matters. I reiterate, I am not here to ask for regulation. I am here to ask for competition.
I was in Congress when Jimmy Carter, in what I thought was a very foolish move, and a fellow by the name of Kahn deregulated the airlines. They deregulated monopolies, so that now instead of having regulated monopolies, we have deregulated monopolies. And very frankly, a public-be-damned attitude on the part of the airlines.
Passenger complaints are enormous. They do not know where to go to complain. So I've gotten huge numbers of complaints about airlines service. People stop me on the street, in the supermarket as I walk around my district, as I attend meetings, and say, Dingell, what in the hell are you people going to do about this situation in airports.
Now, airlines are very good at maximizing profits. They have found that's all they have to do under the current situation.
Our good friend Mr. DeFazio is also to be commended. And I would observe that the Administration has also offered a proposal. it is a good one, but they should do rather more. Very frankly, the Chairman's bill and mine are very good, but they require more.
I would observe to you that we are not here simply to improve the roasting process for airline peanuts or to discuss that curious oxymoron, of airline food. We are here to talk about the legitimate concerns of airline passengers. These concerns merit a quick and appropriate response.
In the wake of legislation, the Air Transport Association has told Mr. McCain in the Senate, and the Congressional members who are involved in this, that Congressional intervention is unnecessary to make the airlines responsive to customer service. Go tell that to any congregation of passengers and see if you escape alive.
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The prices of airlines are very simply influenced by one thing, whether or not there's competition. Let me mention in our Detroit situation, one new airline has come in to serve the Baltimore-Washington-Detroit area. They charge $100. So also does Northwest.
However, Northwest flies directly into the airport at National, where it faces no competition. The price there is $400. Same distance, same service, huge difference in price. You will find this all over.
You should note that where you have an airport which has two hubs, as it does in Chicago, you'll find prices are much lower and much more competitive and service is much better. Complaints at DOT are up 25 percent for all airlines last year. I will not advertise further the very unfortunate events in the great snowstorm in Detroit. I have asked for an FAA letter to explain what all that obtained and what caused it. I think it will be very interesting when we get, finally, a definitive statement as to whether it was the airline or the airport and who was at fault in that particular matter.
But it does appear that there is a direct correlation between the numbers of complaints and very frankly, whether there is any competition. If I am to fly from Detroit to Washington, I have one airline I can take, another with great inconvenience. I would observe to you that when I came to Congress, the price of an airline ticket was $69. Today it is $400 to $800 for that same ticket.
For this reason, I introduced H.R. 4577 in the last Congress. It was intended to increase competition, and thereby to improve levels and prices for service, and to assure affordable airfare for passengers.
This year, I introduced H.R. 780, the Passenger Entitlement and Competition Enhancement Act. The legislation has two purposes. First, it would give airline passengers important rights they deserve and have been calling for and I observe, when they close that door on that aircraft, you haven't got any rights at all, except to do what they tell you. You are not informed as to what the charges are, you can be kept sitting on the runway for up to 11 hours, as they were in Detroit. And quite frankly, the service at all points is really very poor.
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A truly successful redress of the public's grievances would take a two-pronged approach. First, create competition. Let the little guys get in to provide the services that are needed. In most airports today, if you want to go to anyplace other than heaven or hell, and you intend to fly there, you've got to go by one dominant carrier. In Michigan, 75 percent of the flights out of Detroit metropolitan are by one single carrier.
Recently, bad weather complications have arisen, and I've spoken about that. Now, I will tell you the contents of the bill, but I would just as soon insert that into the record and save the time of the committee. I would urge that you understand that there are two parts to the bill. First, some modest contributions to competition. We need to go much farther than that. Frankly, the Department of Justice and the Antitrust Division there, as well as DOT, need to get together to do something to stimulate competition, applying the good old-fashioned antitrust laws, which do not work very well in these systems, but which can put a Federal judge in charge of better behavior by these airlines.
Second, it addresses the problems of unfair treatment of passengers, abuse of passengers, including: long delays; unreasonable delays; baggage liability, which is far too low today; bumping; and a passenger rights publication, tell a guy what his rights are. Today he doesn't have any idea what he can do or who he can go to talk to about the fact that he's treated badly by an airline. Those things should be done.
Frankly, when we turned the airlines loose years ago, I warned that we were going to have the situation we have today. Today, passengers deserve basic courtesy, respect, dignity, and truthfulness. They ain't getting it.
The bills before the committee, frankly, any of them are good, and you can make yourself a fine bill out of passing them all or passing different parts of them. The Chairman has provided fine leadership in this matter, and I commend him for it.
These provisions cost the airlines very little. And many of the provisions cost nothing. All the provisions regarding consumer protections are really very inexpensive and are just basic decency that, frankly, we as a Nation owe to our air-riding passengers for functioning under a magnificent monopoly.
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So I would commend you, Mr. Chairman, for the hearing today. I want to thank you and my friends up there, the two ranking members and Chairman Shuster, and all of my colleagues for simply trying to see that we get a little competition and some basic fairness to the airline passengers.
Thank you.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much for a very fine statement, Mr. Dingell. We do have many provisions in our FAA reauthorization bill, Air 21, that hopefully if we can get them through will help increase competition in the airline industry.
Mr. Forbes.
TESTIMONY OF HON. MICHAEL P. FORBES, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM NEW YORK
Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Lipinski and members of the committee. I appreciate sincerely this opportunity to come before you and the committee's bipartisan approach to trying to deal with the ever-present and growing frustrations of the flying public.
The horror stories that you heard last week certainly suggest that there is really a great need to deal with this problem. Again, I would echo the comments of Mr. Dingell, our distinguished friend from Michigan, this is not about re-regulation as much as it is about putting some conscience back into the safest passenger air system in the world and making sure that those who are charged with administering that system are more sensitive to the needs of the public.
Mr. Chairman, the unhappy stories do not just beset the traveling public once they've purchased their tickets and climbed aboard the aircraft. Rather, the passenger nightmares often begin with the simple purchase of a ticket. For this reason, I would hope that the committee would closely review what steps are necessary in addition to ensure that consumers are not being taken advantage of at the ticket counter. Again, this is about competition.
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Over the last four years, the major airlines have been quietly consolidating their control over the ticket distribution systems. Their actions have forced many independent travel agents, those mom and pop businesses on our main streets across America, those travel agents who offer consumers cost effective air travel options, and they are being forced to go out of business. They have been forced because their customers are actually having to move into the airline's direct ticket sales operations, which the airlines say offer better, but the travel agents suggest offer less, choice for the consumer.
Individual airlines currently will not provide information about competitor's services, for example, even if they are offering better value and they meet the consumer's needs. In short, the passengers not only risk mistreatment when taking a plane trip, they risk mistreatment before they even reach the airport.
Trying to find the best fare on an airline is very difficult at best. The seller has all the information and consumers don't. Small business men and women, harried parents and grandparents, are not going to spend hours on the phone or on the internet attempting to do battle with the airlines and the myriad of fares that are out there. By eliminating consumer access to an unbiased source of fare information, from the independent ticket agents, we believe the airlines intend to achieve the effects of additional fare increases, not decreases as they would have you believe. And consumers would lose again.
More importantly, the practices threaten consumers by threatening the small air carrier and ticketing businesses. The typical travel agency is a small business enterprise, as so many of us so well appreciate. Over 50 percent of America's travel agencies are owned by women and minorities. Many times a travel agency is the only ticket distribution system available in a small, regional or new startup airline.
If the airlines succeed in eliminating the travel agencies, the likelihood of survival by small carriers greatly decreases.
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I draw your attention as well to yet another practice by the airlines that is as incredible as it is anticompetitive. The major airlines have a computerized system of obtaining, believe it or not, a travel agency's proprietary customer and sales data.
In other words, one carrier may be able to look at the keystrokes of one particular agent to see if they are bringing up the schedule of a competing carrier over their own schedule. With this knowledge, the major airlines can easily pressure the travel agents to sell only that carrier's product, or they can monitor and then they can cut them off completely from doing business.
The purpose of the legislation that I've introduced, and I compliment Chairman Shuster and all those who, with me support this very important passenger bill of rights. I would also suggest that H.R. 1030, the legislation I have introduced called the Improved Consumer Access to Travel legislation for 1999 would establish an independent commission to focus specifically on the segment of the airline industry that is at the heart of deregulation, the airline ticket distribution system.
We have to create an independent entity that can objectively study the airline ticket distribution system in this country and make sure that getting that system and preserving that system is at the core of that commission's objective, to see what practices are underway, frankly, to eliminate what we think is a very, very good system with the mom and pop travel agencies across this country, the independent travel agencies that unfortunately are being squeezed out of business.
My legislation does not require the DOT to regulate, re-regulate or exercise any statutory authority to investigate the abuses in the ticket distribution system by airlines. Rather, the legislation simply calls for an independent commission that will conduct a six month finite study of the airline ticket distribution system. At the end of that six months, the commission would report back to Congress and the President findings and recommendations to preserve an independent and accessible travel agency system that would allow for competition and a comparison of prices.
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I appreciate, Mr. Chairman, the committee's time, and I thank you.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Forbes. Those are some good points, good suggestions. We thank you for being with us.
We are going to let you go ahead and go so we can get on to other witnesses following Ms. Slaughter's testimony.
We now have the Honorable Louise Slaughter. I think outside of our committee, no member has been more interested in or involved in these issues of airline competition and airline service than Louise Slaughter. Ms. Slaughter, it is an honor to have you with us today.
TESTIMONY OF HON. LOUISE MCINTOSH SLAUGHTER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM NEW YORK
Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Chairman, it is my honor. I am here to heap lavish praise upon you and the members of this committee for holding this hearing. I have a statement that I'd like to put in the record, because I'd like to comment on some of the things that I heard.
First, I'd like to start with competition. In my city of Rochester, New York, which is a perfectly splendid district that you and I have discussed many times, we have Fortune 500 companies, we export more out of our regional airport than all but nine States in the United States.
But I have between 400,000 and 600,000 persons a year who cannot afford to fly on the prices that we pay in Rochester, New York. They drive to Cleveland, five hours away, to get on a Southwest flight, or to Toronto. Buffalo is doing a little better now, and that's become more attractive for us.
But let's talk about what is competition. In Rochester there are two airlines that would take you round trip from Rochester to Chicago. By most standards, I think that would probably be considered competition. Unfortunately, the price for each one of those airlines is $1,277 round trip. If one of them were to raise the price to $1,278, I am confident the other one would as well.
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Back in the old days when we used to think about such things, that might have been price fixing or collusion, but now I guess we have to call that competition.
We saw in Northeast Airlines, when they had their strike, that whole parts of the United States were left without any service at all. If the intent of deregulation was to make sure that there was more airline service available to more people, at a cheaper rate, then I think we would have to judge it a failure. Because what it has done, Mr. Chairman, it has chosen which regions are economic winners and the economic losers.
I was in Tampa Airport recently, and I was absolutely stunned. I think every airline in the United States flies into Tampa. I thought I had gone to heaven. There must have been 10 or 11 low cost airlines going into Tampa. I would settle for one. I couldn't believe their good fortune down there.
I envy people who go in and out of Chicago Airport efficiently and wonderfully. Let me tell you what it is like sometimes in Rochester. Mostly I fly U.S. Air. And let me say at the outset, their safety record is extraordinary, I love their pilots, they really know what they're doing. But we all get to the airport, for let's say, a 4:00 o'clock flight, we arrive early, we check in, they load the luggage. And we sit around the airport or sometimes even they put us on the plane.
Then they tell us that there's not a crew to fly, and we have to wait a while until they can bring somebody in from Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, or sometimes it is a mechanical difficulty, and they're going to bring a mechanic in from somewhere. If we are sitting in the airport a couple of hours, people start to peel off and go home, and say, I'll come back and go another day. Sometimes getting their luggage, sometimes coming back to get it hours later.
You may believe, Mr. Chairman, that they would jump all over me like bugs on a blanket about what in the world are we going to do about these airlines. We have a saying in Rochester, time to spare, take U.S. Air.
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[Laughter.]
Ms. SLAUGHTER. Now, I am looking forward to the National Science Foundation's report, because I think it will give us a true and accurate assessment of what deregulation has meant. But I can tell you that the northern tier of cities in the State of New York, starting with Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany, are dying a slow death and a lot of it has to do with the fact that we cannot move our people and our goods to market.
I have one industry that exports all over the world that is getting limousine service from Toronto to Rochester to take people over to get them onto an airline in Toronto. I do not understand this, Mr. Chairman. Any airline worth its salt would want to come in and fly those people out at a reasonable rate and make a lot of money.
The same thing with the hub and the spoke idea. This summer, this past summer, I was stuck here once for three solid days. Sitting at the door, finally on the third day, when the airline plane flew in, discharged its passengers, we were all ready to get on, we were a pretty weary crowd. There wasn't a hotel in town and nobody could rent a car. So we were here.
We got ready, all standing up, eager to go home. They told us they couldn't fly us out because they didn't have a crew.
It has gotten to be a contest. Not only do we feel we pay an arm and a leg, but we are not treated as though we really matter. I had, the President of Northwest Airlines was in my district. Basically he said, you're lucky you've got anything. They also talk about 70 percent of our travelers are well to do business people. That's not really so. A lot of people who travel at the last minute in my district are grandmothers with an illness, a new grandbaby, somebody who has to get somewhere, a college student who can not afford to come home.
But with the arrogance of the Big Six airlines, it is really gotten to the point where I think if something happens here, it will be because they killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
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I want airlines to prosper, it is a capitalistic society. I want them to do well. But what they have done in destroying the startup airlines and making it impossible for them to survive, has really damaged the economy in this country. I believe, Mr. Chairman, with the actions that you've taken already on lifting slots and other things you were doing, if we can make it profitable and a good investment, people will want to invest in the low-cost startup airlines. As it is now, they know their life expectancy is so short, that only the richest people on Earth can really make that investment.
But please, as you hold these hearings, think about those of us out in the country, if you have lots of airports and airlines around you, good. But one of the things we really need to look at, too, is can we go into the 21st century with the fact that we've only built one airport since 1972 from the ground up, Stapleton? Should we be looking at a rational transportation policy and moving more people more efficiently and quickly? And I think safety certainly is the first thing, Mr. Chairman.
I hope I haven't gotten myself too wrought up here. But my community depends on what happens in this Congress to level the playing field so the airlines can fly in and out and take some of the best people on Earth to their destinations.
Thank you very much.
Mr. DUNCAN. Well, thank you very much, Ms. Slaughter, for your interest in this issue and for being with us today. You may be excused or remain, whichever you wish.
We'll call up the first panel at this time. We are very pleased to have on the first panel Mr. Andrew H. Card, Jr., who is a Fellow for Public Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Mr. Robert P. Warren, who is Senior Vice President and General Counsel and Secretary for the Air Transport Association; Mr. Richard B. Hirst, who is Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs for Northwest Airlines; Captain Joseph E. Gilroy, who is with Northwest Airlines; and finally, a man who's been here with us many times over the years, Mr. Edward J. Driscoll, who is President and Chief Executive of the National Air Carrier Association.
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We are very appreciative to all of you for taking time out of what we know are very busy schedules to be here with us today. We do proceed in these hearings in the order in which the witnesses are listed on the hearing notice, and that means that Mr. Card, we will go first with you and then with Mr. Warren.
TESTIMONY OF ANDREW H. CARD, JR., FELLOW FOR PUBLIC POLICY, U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE; ROBERT P. WARREN, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, GENERAL COUNSEL, AND SECRETARY, AIR TRANSPORT ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA; RICHARD B. HIRST, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR CORPORATE AFFAIRS, NORTHWEST AIRLINES, INC.; CAPTAIN JOSEPH E. GILROY, NORTHWEST AIRLINES, INC.; AND EDWARD J. DRISCOLL, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE, NATIONAL AIR CARRIER ASSOCIATION
Mr. CARD. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And Chairman Shuster is not here, but I would offer him my respect as well. When I was Secretary of Transportation, he was a wonderful counselor. And to Congressman Sweeney, a long-time friend, it is the first time I've appeared before you on the subcommittee. it is good to see you. I am sorry that my Massachusetts colleague is not here, he has challenges at Worcester Airport, I'd love to work with him to help solve them.
My name is Andrew Card. I am a Fellow for Public Policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, the world's largest business federation, representing more than 3 million businesses and organizations of every size, sector and region. I've had the pleasure of working with you, Mr. Chairman, and other members of your committee in issues affecting transportation over the years. I appreciate the opportunity to join you today.
I salute the historic role that you have had and continue to play in modernizing and improving our Nation's transportation system, to protect lives and promote economic growth throughout the region.
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I am here today to share the concerns of businesses who rely on a safe, efficient and sound transportation system, as well as offer some perspective from my view as a former Secretary of Transportation. Efforts to expand Government involvement in the marketplace are of enormous concern to business. It is our view that airline passenger rights legislation would be unnecessary intervention in the marketplace that would likely increase costs for businesses and most importantly, consumers. It might stifle innovation and it could raise safety issues.
For example, imposing financial penalties on airline operations and decisions about the time passengers await to take off suggests that the reasons for these delays are almost always arbitrary. In fact, in the vast majority, the number of times, there are very good reasons for delaying flights, ranging from inclement weather to inadequacy of the system. I expect everyone would rather have airlines exercise delay in order to be safe rather than sorry.
The question that we really have to ask is, what is the appropriate role for Congress to play in addressing some of these consumer concerns, and what is the role that the Department of Transportation should play in addressing some of these concerns, and quite frankly, what is the role that some of the corporate airlines should play in addressing some of these concerns.
I am not here representing individual companies. In fact, Northwest Airlines is not even a member of the United States Chamber of Commerce. I am here representing the interests of the business community. Micromanagement from Congress has frequently resulted in unintended consequences. DOT on the other hand has plenty of authority to address the concerns that are out in the public marketplace today through current law.
I experienced that responsibility first-hand. It is probably more productive for Government resources to be used to improve our aviation infrastructure rather than try to micromanage solutions to what frequently are anecdotal evidences of corporate challenges that must be addressed by each airline.
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Take for example, Title 49 of the U.S. Code. When I was at the Department of Transportation, it was Section 411. With the recodification, it is now Section 41712. The Secretary of Transportation has broad latitude to address many of the concerns that have been raised in the public domain today. That is through the provisions that address unfair and deceptive practices within the system.
Businesses use the airlines. I suspect that the greatest profit centers for the airlines come from business travelers. However, that doesn't mean that Congress has to micromanage the business relationship with the airline and the consumer's relationship with the airline carrier. It is in the best interests of every single business to provide the highest quality of products and service to its customers that are within its control.
The vast majority of the airline service problems result from inadequate aviation infrastructure, and most importantly, an outdated air traffic control system. Other improvements to the system need to be made. Within the next 10 years, 50 percent of airport runways will require rehabilitation, including 75 percent of the runways at large and medium hubs.
Today the capacity of our infrastructure to safely handle flights and passengers is stretched almost to the limit. Sixty-five percent of all airline delays and cancellations are the result of an overworked and outdated air traffic control system. Your legislation hopes to address that. We favor taking the airline trust fund off-budget and distributing those resources to address the infrastructure need.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to answering your questions.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Card.
Mr. Warren?
Mr. WARREN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is indeed an honor and a privilege to appear before you today to present the views of the Air Transport Association concerning the airline passenger bill of rights, H.R. 700.
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Last year, the U.S. airline industry safely carried over 611 million passengers. This incredible aviation safety record is due in large part to the professionalism, diligence and hard working efforts of the men and women in the public and private sectors that made this achievement possible.
In addressing H.R. 700, the airline industry recognizes that it often generates substantial media attention, and that currently, passenger service issues are under strict scrutiny. We appreciate that the traveling public suffers varying degrees of frustration from time to time, but airlines must and do place safety as their first and overriding priority.
But I want to be clear. We want as well to provide the highest quality of service for our passengers.
Mr. Chairman, I am very pleased to announce that the ATA member carriers are reaffirming their commitment to customer service in recognition of the marketplace reality that customer service is our responsibility. This reaffirmation incorporates many of the constructive ideas that you and other members have proposed.
Let me outline the following steps that airlines are taking to reaffirm their commitment to customer service. First, airlines will provide timely and accurate information concerning flight delays and cancellations to the extent that such information is reasonably available. Second, airlines reaffirm that passengers should expect to be accommodated on flights for which they have a confirmed reservation, a valid ticket, and have adhered to the airline policies.
Third, airlines will quote passengers the lowest fare available for which they qualify. Fourth, airlines that transport unaccompanied minors will have the appropriate supervision available. Fifth, airlines are committed to providing passengers with information on the privileges and redemption requirements of carriers' frequent flier programs. And finally, sixth, airlines reaffirm their commitment to ensuring that passengers receive their luggage in a timely manner, and that they provide their customers with prompt information concerning lost or misrouted baggage.
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In sum, we are committed to ensuring that the lifeline of our industry, our customers, are satisfied to the best of our abilities.
Can we improve? Yes, we can, and we are trying to improve more and more every day. Nineteen ninety-eight was a year in which we all take a great deal of pride. Thousands of mechanics, dispatchers, pilots, flight attendants, bag handlers, fuel suppliers, air traffic controllers and others got to work often in horrible weather and did outstanding jobs. Hundreds of millions of passengers and their families relied upon these working Americans to do their jobs. Their diligence and professionalism made last year not only a record year for the number of passengers enplaned, but also made it the safest year in the history of aviation.
Of the 611 million passengers carried last year, the top 10 major airlines carried approximately 540 million passengers with 5,808 consumer complaints registered with DOT, a rate of 1 per 100,000 passengers flown, a remarkably good record by any measure, and one to keep in perspective as you consider H.R. 700.
I would also like to take issue with the presumption in H.R. 700 that airlines engage in so-called economic cancellations. The industry does not cancel flights based upon some calculus that a particular flight on a particular day, on a particular segment, won't turn a profit. Of course, there are mechanical and other emergency circumstances that cause delays or cancellations. But it bears mentioning that 65 percent of delays are the primary cause of the escalating events that lead to complaints, and that they stem from ATC systems, severe weather, limitations of airport facilities, machines, people or other circumstances.
Despite those factors, every day we are under enormous market pressure to eliminate every delay, every inconvenience and every instance of poor service or an adequate disclosure of information. As my written statement notes, we are concerned about the unintended consequences that may result from the provisions in H.R. 700 that may outweigh any potential benefits.
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For example, the single flight number provision contained in H.R. 700, the right to change aircraft in international through-flights is a long standing right that the U.S. Government has secured to allow U.S. carriers to fully utilize their international route rights. It is a right that is specifically granted in the 1977 Bermuda II bilateral agreement with the United Kingdom. It also is a right contained in all of our open skies bilaterals.
Using the aircraft most suited to a particular segment is vital to the ability of U.S. carriers to compete internationally. This prohibition would reverse decades of settled international law and aviation policy, and would alter the balance of benefits under our international agreements.
Mr. Chairman, we at ATA are committed to our passengers, our members are committed to our passengers, and we are committed to working with this committee on these very important issues. Thank you.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Warren.
Mr. Hirst?
Mr. HIRST. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I must say, I am very, very grateful for the opportunity to appear here, and to respond to some of the things that I've heard said over the last couple of weeks, and this morning, many of which are not true and many of which, if partially true, are largely inaccurate.
I join the remarks of Secretary Card and Mr. Warren and hope the committee will take them very seriously. I am not here to say that the airline industry or Northwest Airlines in particular does everything perfectly. We don't. We believe we operate in a very competitive world, and we believe we are, as we are, in the customer service business. And we do everything we can within our control to operate efficiently, fairly and comfortably.
But there are some things we can do a lot better. I do not think we do a particularly good job of keeping our passengers informed consistently when there are delays and when there are cancellations. We need to do a better job of that.
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And I think consistently, we do not recover well from problems. Recovery is something that we are focusing a lot of time and attention on. In fact, you heard a lot last week about the storm in Detroit. We've spent a lot of time analyzing that and trying to figure out how we should have responded to that, so that if it happens again, if something like that happens again, we will perform better.
I would like to say, and then go on to dealing with problems of unaccompanied minors and the Detroit storm, that we aren't monopolies. We do not earn monopoly profits. If we did, Wall Street hasn't heard about it. Our stock, Northwest sells right now for about eight times earnings. That's typical of the major airline stocks.
The best year we ever had at Northwest Airlines, we earned about 5 percent in terms of net profit. That's not a monopoly profit. Airline pricing is complex. It is complex because we have very high fixed costs, very low variable costs, and you end up with a wide range of fares necessary to cover all your costs.
I'll defend our competitive record with anybody, Mr. Chairman. In the time I have, though, I'd like to turn to Detroit, the unaccompanied minor problem, and I'd like to refer the members to my written testimony, which addresses a lot of the specifics in the bill. And I'd be glad, obviously, to answer any questions about them.
With respect to unaccompanied minors, I think it is been noted, this is a national problem. Northwest carries about 120,000 unaccompanied minors a year, that is, children between the ages of 5 and 12, and another 50,000 between the ages of 12 and 17. In order to do that initially, we assigned responsibilities to our customer service agents. But when problems developed doing that, because they had split responsibilities, and I think you may have seen some of those in your video tape last week, we moved to a different system of using customer service agents whose primary responsibility is shepherding these kids from one flight to another, and if they get caught overnight, staying with them at a hotel outside their hotel room, and staying up with them.
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We believe it is a very successful program. It is evolving, we look at it constantly, we realize we've got a serious responsibility for these kids. We do, I think, do a very, very good job.
With me today is Susan Baumeister, who is sitting back here, who's a customer service agent and quality service agent in Detroit, who is one of the people who is responsible for maintaining the program. If anybody is interested, she's here to answer any questions about it. Talking to her, to me, is an inspiration. It really tells you something about the dedication of our employees.
She, during the storm in Detroit, when she was off duty, took responsibility for two children who were on a diverted flight that she was on, stayed with them for 90 hours without sleep. When she got rerouted back to Detroit, she spent time again, without sleep, helping to deal with the 200 children who were stranded there. And I think she did a great job, I would encourage you to talk to her. I think she is representative of this program.
I would say with respect to the incident that you heard about last week, there are some facts I would like to add. We do not believe that the incident occurred as it was described. The facts were hotly disputed by the older boy, the 15 year old boy who was in the room with the 6 year old. And they were investigated by the Bloomington, Minnesota, police, who filed no charges, came to no conclusion that any wrongdoing had occurred.
There was a suggestion that other, similar incidents have occurred at Northwest. No other similar incidents have been alleged. I have included in my testimony a letter from an attorney, the attorney representing us in the litigation that resulted, describing the discovery and attesting to that fact.
We did, as is our policy, obtain the prior consent of both children's parents before putting them together in a hotel room where the younger boy had been afraid to stay alone. We will not do that again, though, on the basis of these allegations, except in very unusual situations such as the Detroit storm, which I would like to turn to for a minute.
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There are basically three points, Mr. Chairman, I would like to make, and I hope I do not exceed my time too much here. One, January 2nd and January 3rd, this was an unprecedented storm in Detroit. It was the worst storm in 25 years. On Saturday, in the middle of the afternoon, two inches of snow fell in an hour. The airport closed.
When it closed, it trapped 68 aircraft, Northwest Airlines aircraft, on the ground overnight. Normally we only have about 35 that overnight. Many of these aircraft had to be parked in the alleys between the concourses, the Detroit Airport looks somewhat like the palm of your hand. So we woke up on Sunday morning with aircraft parked in the alleys along with ground equipment.
The snow ended about 6:00 o'clock Sunday morning. It appeared that the weather was improving. Our systems operation center in Minneapolis, which controls the operations of the airline, made the judgement based on prior experience at Detroit and at Minneapolis, that by noon, the airport should be open and enough gates should be freed to handle a limited schedule.
So they began scheduling flights into Detroit starting at noon, although the number of flights that came in turned out to be about a third the number of those that were normally scheduled to arrive.
But the weather worsened, and the conditions were much more severe than people had anticipated and understood when that decision was made. If we could have one decision back, we would want that one back. With hindsight, we shouldn't have let any planes come into Detroit until we were certain that all those gates were free. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable judgement. About 39 aircraft came into Detroit on that Sunday.
What they found was that snow removal had not proceeded according to plan, there had been enormous difficulties getting aircraft out of the alleyways between the two gates. So gates couldn't be freed up. I think there were eight aircraft that it turned out had tires that were frozen to the ground. There had been blowing snow, because that afternoon, the wind picked up, temperatures fell. Initially, the snow had been wet. It blew into the engines of aircraft and then froze.
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Some of our people are here who were there. Larry Scott, for example, who is in the red shirt back here, was working on the ground. He went a couple of days without sleep working through that storm. He had never seen, told me yesterday he had never seen conditions like that. He had never seen a situation where they had to inject propylene glycol into the engines of aircraft to free them up.
Greg Cook, who is sitting next to him, was also there. Greg was also up for a couple of days without sleep in the tower, trying to manage the de-icing operation, which had enormous difficulties through whiteout conditions.
The net effect was that as these 39 planes were on the ground, there weren't gates to handle them. As gates were freed up, the planes were brought in. And I must say, Mr. Chairman, when I first heard about this, and heard that some of these planes sat on the ground for seven hours, I was as outraged as anybody who I've heard react to this. My reaction was, come on, there must have been some way to get those people off planes. You do not leave people on planes for seven hours.
But I talked to the people who were involved. I talked to Harry Butler, who was in the tower, who was in charge of making those judgments. I've talked to Greg and to Larry. I've talked to many people who were involved.
They all say that the conditions were extraordinary, and that had they used hard stands or chutes to disembark people, there would have been injuries. They made a judgment based on safety that the planes should wait until gates opened up for them. The hard stands, if they had been able to get them to the aircraft, many of which were a couple of miles from the terminal, were metal, and they would have been very, very dangerous for people to use. They either would have been iced or covered with propylene glycol.
Chutes, if you had pulled the chutes, as I heard somebody suggest last week, the NTSB estimates than when emergency chutes are used to evacuate aircraft, about 7 percent of the people who use them are injured. A decision was made not to do that. Remember, the wind chill factor was 30 below zero that afternoon. And as to the use of other airlines' gates, we tried. We called every other airline. No other airline had any space available. There was no issue about expense or saving money by not using a vacant gate. There were no vacant gates. Other airlines called us.
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In fact, within the industry there is a practice to accommodate each other in situations like that. So we have done everything we can to make sure this doesn't happen again, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DUNCAN. I apologize to you, but I've had a couple of members ask me to be fair and proceed with other witnesses.
Mr. HIRST. I apologize, there's an awful lot of stuff from last week.
Mr. DUNCAN. Well, thank you very much. You will be able to make additional comments in response to questions.
Captain Gilroy?
Captain GILROY. Chairman Duncan, Ranking Members Lipinski and Oberstar, and other members of this distinguished subcommittee, I thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you on behalf of Northwest Airlines about the now infamous Detroit New Year's weekend blizzard.
My name is Joseph Gilroy, I am a captain for Northwest Airlines. I fly the A-320 aircraft, and I've been employed by them as a pilot for 14 years.
As a pilot riding in the cockpit jump seat of one of the aircraft impacted by this historic storm, I had a unique ringside seat to the event. Not only did I experience the same frustration our customers suffered, I was witness to and participated in extraordinary efforts of literally a cast of thousands that included Wayne County Airport personnel, air traffic controllers, airport police, paramedics and many, many other Northwest Airlines employees who worked tirelessly to unsnarl the resulting chaos caused by the storm.
At Northwest, our number one guiding principle is never compromise safety. Despite the unfortunate circumstances of the January 2nd and 3rd storm, I can say with complete confidence that the employees of Northwest Airlines adhered with unyielding determination to that principle.
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At the outset, let me emphasize that I have complete confidence in Northwest's systems operation control, or SOC, in Minneapolis. These employees are charged with making operational decisions about the movement of Northwest aircraft. I, as well as all Northwest flight crews, rely on the many decisions these people make every time we fly. On more than one occasion in my career, good planning by SOC has prevented a bad situation before it could develop.
Our operations center and flight dispatchers dispatched aircraft to Detroit only after ''study of all the information available tonight.'' Only now, with perfect 20-20 hindsight can it be said that the greatly reduced number of flights allowed to land at Detroit was simply too much for the snowbound airport to handle.
From the moment we landed on Sunday, I was struck by the extreme nature of the snow conditions. Not in 17 years of airline flying in the Great Lakes region had I seen weather conditions and snow conditions that severe. Near gale force winds blew snow onto ramps and taxiways that had been cleaned by plows only moments before, and subzero wind chills threatened to freeze exposed skin.
The extreme frustration of our crews was evident on the radio as pilots and Northwest ramp tower personnel discussed all available options to deplane aircraft. Deplaning at a remote location via exposed air stairs was determined to be unmanageable and far too risky to passengers in conditions so severe. Shuttling aircraft into and out of end gates was considered but not pursued, because when tried the night before, it took approximately 60 minutes to unload each of the 30 waiting aircraft.
While I am extremely sympathetic to the hardship our passengers experienced, I continue to believe that we correctly chose to stick with our zero injury option of waiting for gates to become available. Even as bad as conditions became, we were at all times able to respond effectively to the medical needs of our passengers. In fact, on my flight, a passenger became ill, and after examination by a physician on board, it was determined that he should be transported to a hospital.
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I am happy to say that due to the quick actions and decisive actions of many Northwest employees, the gentleman was safely removed when the last remaining gate at the airport was made available to us. I should add that had no gate been available, other more drastic options were discussed and available should the situation have become more critical.
Mr. Chairman, as an airline pilot, I take great pride in my profession and my airline. I know that my fellow airline employees approach their jobs with the same sort of dedication, professionalism and desire to provide at all times the type of service our customers deserve and have come to expect.
In dramatic fashion, the events of January 2nd and 3rd show that sometimes, conditions and events beyond our ability to predict frustrate our ability to provide our passengers the level of service they deserve. Likewise, our ability to respond to changing conditions in a dynamic and challenging environment are likewise influenced largely by the quality and the scope of the outside support we receive.
Consequently, it is my opinion that this legislation cannot achieve this Congress' and the industry's goal of improving customer service without addressing the need to improve, update and modernize the surrounding infrastructure.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my remarks related to the New Year's blizzard in Detroit. I look forward to answering any questions you or the members may have.
If you believe it would be helpful to the subcommittee, I would be glad to share my first-hand experiences with you about other reasons we frequently experience significant delays. Let me assure you, delays are as frustrating to us in the cockpit as they are to our customers.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Captain Gilroy.
Mr. Driscoll?
Mr. DRISCOLL. Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, NACA and its carriers appreciate the opportunity to appear in connection with H.R. 700. As you know, NACA carriers are the small, national carriers which provide both scheduled and charter service, passengers and cargo domestically and internationally. In addition, NACA carriers support DOD and the CRAF program.
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Domestically, internationally, we are about 50-50 in our operations. As far as charter and schedule are concerned, it is about 45-55, 45 percent charter, 55 percent scheduled. The proposed bill in our judgment is tantamount to re-regulation. Some of the provisions in our estimation are not required as DOT has the necessary authority and should be permitted to take necessary action as they have in some of the code sharing cases, and if they need additional legislation, then they should advise the Congress and recommend what is the minimum necessary so that they can assure that the airlines are performing in accordance with their certificates.
Charters, as you possibly know, are fully regulated by DOT under the provisions of 14 CFR Part 208, 212 and 380. In fact, a charter cannot be canceled within 10 days of operation, deposits of consumers are fully protected either through escrow or blending arrangements. Charters are typically regulated A to Z.
Therefore, in our judgment, charters should be exempt from H.R. 700. H.R. 700 should not attempt to regulate international, either, as they would create an unlevel playing field, and national carriers which do not provide hub and spoke systems, do not engage in code sharing and have very limited if any frequent flier programs should not be regulated.
As we have said, our carriers, the small carriers, definitely provide low fare service. They have, whether it be by charter or in their scheduled service. They operate domestically, internationally and all of their fares are low and very competitive. Because that's the only way we can get repeat business, is if we are competitive. Therefore, we encourage the committee to consider exempting charters, international and national or the smaller carriers, who are less than $1 billion in revenues by individual carrier.
My carriers, just to give you a magnitude, generate about $2.5 billion a year in revenues. The largest of the carriers is less than $1 billion.
That concludes my prepared statement. I trust that you will make my original statement part of the record. Thank you.
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Mr. DUNCAN. The full statements of all the witnesses will be a part of the record.
Mr. Isakson was here from the start and was not given an opportunity to make an opening statement. So I am going to yield my time for questions at this point to Mr. Isakson.
Mr. ISAKSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have two questions. I think the first would be most appropriately addressed to Mr. Warren.
I understand, and I have not seen this myself, that there is a web site for the purposes of selling unclaimed baggage from airlines. If that's true, and I have not seen it myself, I have two questions. One, at what point do the airlines determine that the owner of a bag cannot be located, and second, do the airlines, when they have difficulty locating someone, actually open the bag to see if there is any additional evidence inside that might direct them to the owner?
Mr. WARREN. I am personally unaware of a web site that is involved in the sale in any way of lost or partially destroyed baggage. It should be put into context that 99.5 percent of all bags, and there are over 2 million bags checked on a daily basis, arrive with the passenger at their particular flight. Of that one half of one percent, 70 percent reaches the passenger within 24 hours.
Airlines make very effort to ensure that bags get to passengers. Since that costs them money, it comes out of their own hot pockets, whether they have profit sharing plans or other remuneration, it is not in the interest of the airlines to in any way do anything but get the bags back to the passengers if in fact, they are delayed or mislaid, as quickly as possible.
Mr. ISAKSON. My second question would be to Mr. Hirst. First of all, I think you said her name was Susan Baumeister, is that right?
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Mr. HIRST. That's correct.
Mr. ISAKSON. I do not know that I could ask her one directly, but I would commend her for taking care of those two kids for 90 hours, and what she did and other members of the airlines. I read in your testimony that you had changed subsequent to the incident, I guess it was in Detroit, your policy, by no longer putting two unaccompanied minors in the same room, is that correct?
Mr. HIRST. That's correct.
Mr. ISAKSON. My question is this, really on behalf of parents all over this country whose children may be required to travel unaccompanied on an airline, is the policy that Susan and other, customer service reps, follow in your airline in the management of unaccompanied minors, is that policy available easily to a parent, number one?
And number two, in extraordinary circumstances, which I realize Detroit was, but those can exactly happen, and that's when a parent is most worried, what are the follow-up responsibilities when in fact now, in your airline, an unaccompanied minor will be put by themselves in a single room, to the supervision of that minor while they're in that room by a Northwest employee?
Mr. HIRST. In answer to your first question, sir, we have a brochure that describes the program in some detail. I think the information is easily obtainable about the program.
When there is a problem, if a flight is delayed, or an unplanned overnight stay occurs, if it occurs in one of our hubs, there are lounges there, and they are very well equipped. They have a phone line that's always available for the child to call his parents at Northwest's expense. If a child has to stay overnight, we assign a quality service agent to stay with the child, and that agent stays awake throughout the night, sitting outside the room.
Any problem arises, he or she will presumably hear of it and be able to do something about it. Again, if you get a chance to talk to Susan when she's here, I think she can fill you in and give you some sense of the commitment that these folks have to these children.
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Mr. ISAKSON. So when they are put up overnight in a hub city, and it is a minor child, it is one child only since this incident, and there is external supervision outside the room, so the room is watched, is that correct?
Mr. HIRST. That is correct, sir.
Mr. ISAKSON. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Isakson.
I've been asked by Mr. Lipinski to go first to Mr. DeFazio.
Mr. DEFAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank Mr. Lipinski. Gentlemen, I ask you to keep your answers brief, because we only have five minutes. I have a number of things to go through.
Mr. Card, I remember your service at the Department of Transportation. I guess I'd like you to tell me, from your service there, I have proposed that the Department of Transportation have a toll-free number for complaints since 1987. And I have yet to receive support from DOT. Can you tell me why that might be, briefly?
Mr. CARD. In all honesty, Congressman, I wasn't aware of your requests. So remember, I had a wonderful opportunity to be Secretary of Transportation, but it was only for 11 months. But I can tell you that the Department takes very, very seriously consumer questions and complaints. Very, very seriously.
Mr. DEFAZIO. That's responsive, I appreciate it. Actually, when we had the panel here last week one woman said she spent $200 on toll calls before she discovered there was an office or a person in the Department of Transportation who might take her complaint. I think you might agree it would be useful to have a published number, readily available, perhaps even a 1-800 number.
But when I consistently have asked, and I never did get to ask you personally, at DOT, they would say, God, no, we would get so many complaints we couldn't staff the office and we would not be able to handle it. But we keep hearing now they only get 5,000 complaints. Well, guess what? No one knows they're there, they do not know they can complain there.
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Mr. Card, with your considerable experience with the U.S. Chamber and advocating that Government shouldn't regulate, could you name another industry, a competitive industry, where all of the major parties within a 24 hour period raised their prices the same percentage average as happened last weekend with the airline industry? Just quickly give me another industry that acts like that, that's a competitive industry.
Mr. CARD. I can probably cite several examples. As you remember, I used to represent the automobile industry. When their pricing strategies were announced, frequently there would be a lot of activity in pricing strategies at the same time.
The competitiveness in American capitalism suggests that all of the competitors watch each other costly and do make adjustments. I have witnessed many, many times where prices have been raised by one carrier, for example, in the airline industry, and other carriers did not go along, and immediately prices did not get raised.
Mr. DEFAZIO. Thank you. Well, in fact, the article I read quoted, saying,' we tried to raise prices 18 times, Northwest would not play ball, now they're playing ball and we are all raising prices.' That does not suggest to me a competitive industry. But in any case.
Mr. Warren, from the ATA perspective, you talk about the commitment to service. I had a Member of Congress raise this issue to me yesterday because he knew about my passenger rights bill, and it had also happened to me recently. He would like to know, if it constitutes denied boarding when you're on an airline and your connecting flight leaves early, even though you arrive in time and ran the length of the terminal, as he and I did recently, and the airline actually had left early. Here's the deal:
You're on, in this case, United Airlines, you're going to San Francisco. Your plane is late, but no so late. The connecting flight is still there, it is not yet time for departure. You run to the gate, they have closed the door. It is six minutes before departure. They refuse to open the door. The plane sits there.
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After a while, they disconnect the plane from the gate, wheel it back a little bit, it sits there another 20 minutes, they still refuse to put you on the plane. This has happened to me, it happened to him two days ago.
Under this commitment to service, is this a problem? Would we call this maybe a denied boarding or something? I am on the same airline, they know I am coming and they do not let me get on my connecting flight because they're leaving early for some bizarre reason. And when I've complained to United, they say, that's up to the zone manager and the gate agent.
Mr. WARREN. These are determinations, but there are certain pressures which I think it is fair to—
Mr. DEFAZIO. The plane sat out in front of this gate, it was not removed from the gate. This Member of Congress observed it, I observed the same thing. Is that a commitment to service, when you're connecting on a flight and you're denied boarding?
Mr. WARREN. We certainly—
Mr. DEFAZIO. Should we have a policy that that is—I tell you what I am going to do. I am going to introduce a bill that says that that type of circumstance constitutes denied boarding, whatever the airline's policies are. You can have your policies on denied boarding, we are going to define what denied boarding is. Because that sure as heck is not commitment to service.
Would you name an industry where everybody raises prices the same amount within 24 hours that is a competitive industry? Please name one for me other than airlines.
Mr. WARREN. Well, I think Mr. Card has given you ample—
Mr. DEFAZIO. Well, he did not. He vaguely talked about the auto industry, who provide a myriad of products which people can shop among. He did not talk about prices on airline tickets, where there doesn't seem to be a heck of a lot of choice, especially when many cities like mine are only served by one airline. What's your choice? Walk?
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Mr. WARREN. You do not take into account, Congressman, the situation when prices go down. And prices go down—
Mr. DEFAZIO. I do not think they should go up or down together. It doesn't sound like a competitive industry to me if everybody goes up or down at the same time. That says to me, I am putting pressure on you not to go down when I do not want to go down and I am putting pressure on you to go up when maybe you do not want to go up.
Mr. WARREN. The airline industry is a highly competitive industry. Each competitor looks at one another—
Mr. DEFAZIO. Is it competitive when only one airline serves a city, and it is 100 miles to the nearest alternate city? Is that a competitive situation?
Mr. WARREN. Congressman, there are—
Mr. DEFAZIO. Is that a competitive situation, yes or no? I just want to know. Can one airline compete with itself? Is that competitive?
Mr. WARREN. It all depends on what particular circumstances are surrounding that airport, and what options the customers have in terms of various—
Mr. DEFAZIO. They can get in the car, drive for 100 miles, two hours, park their car, add two and a half, three hours to their trip, as a business traveler, each way, in order to have a choice. That's competition? that's adequate?
Mr. WARREN. No, there is competition, strong competition, both in smaller, mid-size communities, as well as in large communities.
Mr. DEFAZIO. If I could, Mr. Chairman, indulge me just one more question for Northwest, and I am not going to get in to the storm at all. But I just would like the gentleman at Northwest to answer the same question the other two gentlemen really couldn't answer.
What other industry specifically do you find in which everybody in the industry, all the major players, raise their prices by an identical percentage within a 24 hour period that is considered competitive, other than the airline industry?
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Mr. HIRST. I am in the airline industry, I am not in other industries. I would be glad to—
Mr. DEFAZIO. Well, I just want you to, because you went on at great length about how competitive and how complex pricing was, and it has nothing to do with distance traveled, which I know, because it costs me four times to fly to Portland as Eugene, same airline miles, they're separated by 100 miles. One airport has competitors, the other doesn't.
But I understand that.
Mr. HIRST. Basically the problem is that this is a commodity business, it is extremely price sensitive. Nobody is persistently able to, on the basis of product, charge more than another airline. So prices move together.
We do not earn high profits. And we certainly are, as businesses, trying to increase revenues and if possible increase our margins. It is very, very difficult, because the business is so competitive.
If we were earning double digit profits, I would think you would have a point. I'll be glad to do some research, Congressman, if it would help and see if there are other industries—
Mr. DEFAZIO. I am just curious, you keep talking about how you do not want the heavy hand of regulation, because you are so competitive and you are doing a great job and you are committed to service. We are hearing the opposite thing from our constituents.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. DeFazio.
Vice Chairman Sweeney.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank our guests and panelists for their presentation.
I sat here and listened to my good friend, Andy Card, talk about the need for us to resist micromanaging in industry. Andy, you know that I agree with you on 90 percent of those issues, in that we in Congress ought to have a constrained approach to the private sector and the public application of rules and regulations. We are in the midst of that great experiment.
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I want to echo a little bit the frustration of my colleague, Mr. DeFazio. I have to tell you, Mr. Hirst, as I sit here and listen to you talk about the storm and talk generally about the industry, it strikes me that the industry itself is in the great depths of denial, that everything is going well and it is somebody else's fault. We heard that repeatedly last week, that that was the approach the industry has taken.
I hear it repeatedly from my constituents. So I'll suggest to each of you, especially my good friend Andy Card, that our role here is to maybe provide for you in the industry a wake-up call. These hearings are critically important to the people we represent, and the industry itself needs to move more quickly and maybe more seriously adopt the old adage that the customer is always right. Because it seems to me that you're not doing that at all, it is the customer is wrong and we've got it under control. None of us, I think, believe that.
But let me ask Captain Gilroy, because I think you were on the ground, and I do not want to delve too deeply and try to micromanage in hindsight what happened in Detroit at the beginning of the year. But maybe you could tell us what you knew of the plans and procedures that were in place and how those plans and procedures were to be executed in like situations.
Captain GILROY. I can give you a good example. As I mentioned in my remarks, our SOC takes a very proactive view of issues like this. I recall a circumstance, I believe it was in the winter of 1995, when we had a significant weather event that impacted the entire east coast. Northwest Airlines is unique amongst its peers in that we have a full time staff of meteorologists that looks very closely at weather systems.
In that circumstance, they were able to forecast a significantly different forecast than the National Weather Service was issuing. In fact, we forecasted in that circumstances, snow as far south as the Carolinas, I believe 11 inches of snow in that circumstance was forecast to hit Raleigh, North Carolina. The National Weather Service wasn't even forecasting any significant precipitation there.
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And as a result of that, we were able to make the decision to pull our fleet off the east coast, which we did. Our competitors chose to leave their aircraft there, and they were significantly impacted by—
Mr. SWEENEY. Excuse me, and that wasn't available for your flight to Detroit?
Captain GILROY. Yes, sir, it was, and I believe that our SOC did a very good job in pulling back the number of flights. We had a significant problem, I believe, with the flow of information that was available to them. As Mr. Hirst stated, we anticipated that airplanes would have been moved off the gates in preparation for the aircraft to arrive.
My flight, for example, we were told, do not arrive in Detroit prior to 2:30 p.m., which we landed at 2:35 p.m. Unfortunately, once we had departed from Newark, that information was not then transmitted to us, that this airport's not going to be able to handle you. I know our people in our ramp tower worked constantly to get the airplanes safely off the gates. I know that at no time did they feel they were more than a couple of hours from breaking the airport free.
But once they would solve one problem, due to the severe conditions, another problem would seem to creep up. We had tugs that were running out of fuel, and we couldn't get fuel to the tugs because of some environmental concerns with the tank system, and other things like that.
Mr. SWEENEY. Since the incident, and that seven hour wait, what have you done, Mr. Hirst, what adjustments has your airline made?
Mr. HIRST. Well, a number of things, Mr. Sweeney. One of the things we've done is to designate what we call a go team. If we ever have a severe weather emergency, we dispatch employees from all over our system to add to the personnel who are there. One of the problems we had in Detroit was that because the streets were unplowed Saturday night, only about half of our employees could get to the airport.
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The last time there was a storm in Detroit, I think it was last week, the week before, we dispatched this group of people from all over the system, so we made sure we had enough people there. We've re-examined our communications procedures between the SOC, the systems operation center, in Minneapolis and our other stations, such as Detroit, to make sure that there is more communication and more timely communication, so that judgments that are made can be reevaluated and reexamined.
We worked with the airport to redo their snow removal plan. Because it presented some problems. During Saturday, for example, the de-ice pad that we were using did not get de-iced promptly. That created a lot of the congestion and the delays on Saturday, which led to the excessive number of planes that were overnighted and that led to more of the problems.
So we've done quite a bit, and we'd be glad to make available to you the documentation on that.
Mr. SWEENEY. I see my time has run out. I want to ask a couple of very quick questions.
As you know, the testimony we received last week is absolutely contrary to what you just told us. We were told that you had staffing in that airport. We were told that you had staffing nearby, that you simply didn't deploy them.
Let me ask this one final question. As part of your corrections in procedures, has the airline instituted a toll-free number for customer service?
Mr. HIRST. We are looking at that. we are studying it.
Mr. SWEENEY. Can you explain to me why you would not have that done after such an occurrence, where you have a 1-800—
Mr. HIRST. Personally, I think it is a very good idea.
Mr. SWEENEY. Would you let me finish? Where you would have a 1-800 number for reservations, it seems to me that your priorities again are a little bit backwards.
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Mr. HIRST. Fair enough. We are an evolving business. And we are doing the best we can to move ahead, make improvements to our business as we learn more about the environment we are operating in. We have a proposal that we are taking to our board to establish a 1-800 number for customer complaints. Personally, I think it is a very good idea.
One of the things we are learning as we develop our hub systems is that investments made in making the hub operate efficiently, although they may be high initially, tend to pay off. Because when the hub doesn't operate efficiently, expenses and inconvenience spirals, it multiplies. And an investment in an 800 number will allow us more rapidly I think to respond to what our customers want to tell us, and will turn out to be a good investment. I predict that's what we will do.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Sweeney. Mrs. Johnson.
Mrs. JOHNSON. Thank you very much.
I have listened to the testimony of the passengers as well as this panel. I have not yet received the information that I would like to seek. I do not think any passenger desires to be subjected to danger by flying when the weather is not predictable, or predictable and not pleasant. I've been in situations, all of us here are pretty much frequent fliers. Though you might be frustrated, nobody's upset, because you have caused us to have more safety by not flying during those times.
But it is during those times and how it is handled on the ground is what many of the people are concerned about. I do not like any regulation any more than you do. But I think that when regulations are passed, it is out of the demand from the people to solve problems.
I wonder, you heard, I am sure, all of that testimony and you experienced the situations. Have you taken steps to correct it? For example, one lady spoke of being out of food, toilets running over, but could not get back to a gate or get off, and I guess nobody thought of bringing anything to the plane. Have you thought about solving those kinds of problems?
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Mr. HIRST. Yes, we have, Congresswoman.
Mrs. JOHNSON. Tell me some of the steps you have taken.
Mr. HIRST. One of the things we were concerned about was that there wasn't a plan in place that would allow aircraft to be moved to a plowed location in Detroit where passengers could be offloaded onto stairs safely and then bussed away. One modification to the Detroit Metro airport snow plan will involve plowing on a priority basis one of the holding boxes that's near a road, where it can be possible under the right circumstances to unload planes if necessary manually.
We recognize, though, that that is—or can be—a dangerous process, because the hard stands are metal. If they're in iced conditions, either passengers are going to be getting off on ice or they're going to be getting off on propylene glycol that's been used to de-ice them, which is very slippery.
I think the situation in Detroit was unique. And it consisted, as Captain Gilroy said, of a series of steps, one of which added onto the problem caused by the last. The fact that we ended up with 68 aircraft overnight in Detroit on Saturday led to a lot of the problems of clearing the gates on Sunday.
So a number of the steps we've taken working with the airport, modifying their snow plan, and working with ourself internally to modify our communications plan, would have prevented those planes from being overnighted Saturday night, which would have made it possible, I think, to have cleared gates on a more rapid basis.
We hated having to be in a position of parking planes on the tarmac without adequate lavatory facilities and without adequate food or things to drink. I mean, all of us, when I heard about that, I felt terrible about it, I still feel terrible about it.
But nobody was hurt. We didn't do anything that led to people putting themselves in danger trying to get off those planes. Having to trade off safety against customer convenience and comfort was simply the tradeoff we had to make at that point.
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Mrs. JOHNSON. But you have not planned any way to relieve a situation in case, there's hardly any way we can predict that the weather won't get that way again.
Mr. HIRST. What we can do is, if the weather gets that way again, prevent 68 planes from clogging the gates. The reason we couldn't get the planes on Sunday to the gates was that overnight, 68 planes sat there and basically got snowed in. I do not think we would see—
Mrs. JOHNSON. But if you have 25 planes, which is really less than 68, that had to wait that number of hours, what's going to make the situation better for the people on that plane?
Mr. HIRST. We are doing everything we can to make sure that doesn't ever happen again. It is just not acceptable to have—
Mrs. JOHNSON. But if it happened again, what will you do? Have you made any plans?
Mr. HIRST. I am not sure there is anything we could do that we haven't already done. We train our people to do the best they can under those circumstances. We do everything we can to get the planes to the gates or get them some place where they can be unloaded in a safe manner.
We had a combination of circumstances in Detroit that weekend that made all the things we would normally do impossible to do.
Mrs. JOHNSON. If this happened and, is there any way to get any diapers or juice or food or any relief to the passengers who are out there, and can not get off, they've got children, babies and elderly, no medication, no water to drink?
Mr. HIRST. Again, the problem here was that the planes, most of these planes were parked on a taxiway that was two miles from the airport. It was linked only by another road that was unplowed, it had a foot of snow on it. It wasn't possible to get supplies out to those planes.
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If they had, getting them up to the planes, I was told, would have been difficult if not impossible because of the way they were lined up. They couldn't get the trucks—
Mrs. JOHNSON. So it is not possible to alter anything if this happens again?
Mr. HIRST. This was an unusual set of circumstances. Our efforts have been designed to prevent it from ever occurring again.
Mrs. JOHNSON. Yes, sir, I understand that. But if it happened again—
Mr. HIRST. We are doing everything we can to prevent if from happening again. But we do not operate in a perfect world. We can not guard against every weather event. Perhaps something like this will happen again. I believe we've taken steps that will make it very unlikely.
Mrs. JOHNSON. Thank you. Let me say that the last thing I'd like to do is support a lot of regulation, re-regulation, whatever. But we cannot continue to answer to constituents unless we've been convinced that you're going to take care of this. Most of the things that happened here is as a result of constituents pressing us for it. If there is no pressure, we normally do not try to fix the problem. Because we are not even aware there is a problem.
But when there are problems as severe as this—
Mr. HIRST. Mrs. Johnson, we have exactly the same interest you do. We are in the customer service business. If we do not find ways to meet our customers' needs, we are not going to stay in business. So we are totally working on the same page here.
Mrs. JOHNSON. What is your policy if someone has to go to a hotel room, or can go to a hotel room if they have minor children, children traveling alone?
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Mr. HIRST. If children are traveling alone and they are kept overnight because of a disruption, flight's canceled, delayed, then we obtain a hotel room for them, a quality service agent such as Mrs. Baumeister goes to the room with them. We do not put two children together in the same room, even though we have done it in the past on request. Because a lot of times, a small child will be afraid to be alone.
But we do not do that any more. The quality service agent stays outside the room throughout the night, stays awake, sits there, is available in case any problems arise.
Mrs. JOHNSON. Thank you very much.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you. Mr. Hutchinson?
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I had a series of questions I wanted to ask to Mr. Warren. First of all, and I've referenced this in my opening statement, Mr. Warren, have the major carriers taken any positive steps to address the concerns that we've heard during these hearings, and also the concerns that are targeted in the legislation pending before this committee? And if you would, explain any steps that the carriers have taken.
Mr. WARREN. Yes, Congressman, the members of ATA have seriously taken a look at customer service issues. They've examined internally what they can do to address those customer service issues. They have worked together to come forward with those issues that they feel that through the various legislative efforts are the highest priority, that need remedial effort. They have come up with their commitment to customer service, which I set forth in my testimony, both written and oral, today.
They are very committed to ensuring that, as I said, that customers received the best service that can be provided.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. In this legislation, there are certain responsibilities that are placed on the carriers, certain rights that are given to passengers. Any time you create a right, there has to be a remedy available to enforce that right. I guess there's two ways that can be done, one is through the Department of Transportation and setting up an enforcement mechanism. The other would be a private right of action by the customer.
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Have you considered the impact of the private right of action provisions in some of this legislation, and what is your reaction to that?
Mr. WARREN. Congressman, the issue of rights, routes and services are a matter of exclusive Federal jurisdiction, and preemption is what makes this industry a global industry. It is the interstate nature of this industry that requires that preemption be something that benefits both keeping costs down and the general public.
As in terms of the legislation itself, there are certain aspects of it that are very punitive, for example. There are certain aspects that have unintended consequences. I think when you take a look at that, whether or not it is from the aspect of what crews are supposed to respond to or what DOT is supposed to decide with the Secretary of Transportation, you're going to have a situation where crews are not going to be going over their checklists, but are going to be asking the questions, what did we know and when did we know it? When did we get the air traffic control directive, are we in fact recording that appropriately?
And if in fact there is litigation based upon an adverse determination by the Administrator of the FAA or by the Secretary, are we going to find arrival delays or departure delays a subject of litigation in which crews and others are brought in to have to litigate as to whether there was or was not a directive.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Can you give me an estimate as to how many complaints the airlines receive last year? Take last year, for example.
Mr. WARREN. Last year, according to the Department of Transportation's own figures, the top 10 carriers had 5,808 complaints. If you were to parse that out over 100,000 emplanements, it would be 1.8 per 100,000 emplanements.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. What is the primary nature of complaints that you receive, that airlines receive, from passengers?
Mr. WARREN. There are various categories of complaints. I do not have them in front of me today, Congressman. But if you were to take a look at the complaints that were in 1997, which were 4,550, and the complaints last year, if you look at them in terms of complaints per 100,000, there has been a very minuscule increase in those complaints.
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Mr. HUTCHINSON. Well, I would simply encourage the airlines. You've tried to make some efforts, and I think these hearings have drawn attention to some of the problems and concerns of the passengers. I would encourage you to continue to think as to how you can better serve. I know you do that in terms of competition.
But I would also encourage you to look at your pricing structure. There has to be some creative means out there, some better ways to price things that the public has a good feeling about and a sense that there is fairness, that competition is really resulting in a fair pricing structure. We do not want these regulations, and I hope that they will not happen. But it is up to the airlines to really take the initiative to meet the concerns of customers, regardless.
This is a regulated industry, and nothing's going to change in that. But we want to minimize that so competition can work.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Hutchinson.
Mr. Warren, just out of curiosity, you've talked about the complaints that the Department of Transportation receives. But do you keep figures on the complaints that the airlines themselves receive?
Mr. WARREN. I have no knowledge, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DUNCAN. You do not have that?
Mr. WARREN. No, sir.
Mr. DUNCAN. All right. Ms. Millender-McDonald.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. That's a good question that you raised, and perhaps there should be a type of request that would look into how many complaints that the airlines get.
We all recognize, gentlemen who are here before us, that the weather patterns are changing. I certainly see them in California. We do not have sunshine every day and degrees of 78 to 80 degree weather. Such as weather patterns are changing, so should policies and practices. Those that you have perhaps had in the past, I would suggest, must be reviewed for now a whole changing global pattern in terms of weather.
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I commend you on saying that safety is first. God knows I like that, as much as we travel, we certainly want safety to be your number one priority, and that we are assured of that.
But in listening to you, there are some questions that I would like to raise, first with Mr. Card. You mentioned certainly micromanagement is not and should not be a part of our forte, and I agree with you on that. But the responsibility of consumer satisfaction, some consumer safety, also your responsibilities for the competitiveness, should be a shared agreement. I would ask you, you stated that if we should pass or should bring about H.R. 700, I think, that it would stifle innovation and that it will raise safety issues. Can you please extrapolate and tell me how that could be?
Mr. CARD. First of all, I think if there are regulations that are well intended, there are almost always unintended consequences. And I can even speak to the pressure that might come on an airline to move an aircraft away from a gate because the Department of Transportation keeps very good on-time departure and on-time arrival statistics. There is tremendous pressure to have the airline depart the gate.
That pressure should not supersede the safety obligations that the airline would have. I think there are sometimes competitive pressures where the airlines want to have the greatest number of on-time departures or arrivals.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. Are you suggesting that those inferences, are you suggesting that there are provisions in this bill, the bill of rights bill, that would suggest just that?
Mr. CARD. I think there are unintended consequences that could come from regulations that might be imposed through Congress. I do not question the ability of the Department of Transportation, through their regulatory regime, to consider changes in the regulations. But when a Congressional mandate is put in law to become, in all effectiveness, a regulation, it is very hard to change that regulation if it is statutory.
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If it is a regulatory regime, the Department of Transportation first of all would have to notify everyone that they were considering the regulation. There would be a due process where people could express their concerns, there would be deliberation within the Department. And if there were unintended consequences, they would more quickly be addressed through the regulatory process than through the statutory process.
So that's one of my suggestions, that the many suggestions that are in that bill that take the form of regulation are really taking the form of statute. If there are unintended consequences, it is very difficult to change them.
I can speak to the challenges that we had most recently in the automobile industry with regard to airbags. It was very difficult to adjust the regulations to meet the challenges of overly aggressive airbags, because there was a statutory obligation with regard to airbags. I just think that it is best that the Department of Transportation be encouraged to pursue regulatory regimes in their domain with the interest of Congress, but without the statutory mandate.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. That is interest that I can perhaps be open to. But I just wanted to make sure that what you stated, in terms of the safety feature, was that part and parcel of what you just said as well, sir?
Mr. CARD. I think the regulatory desires that might come through statute that would impact performance of the airlines might cause performance to supersede common sense safety obligation. That would be troubling, because it might invite lawsuits with regard to the performance when the performance changes might have been made based on safety considerations.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. Well, I can certainly understand that. Before we get into a mandatory type of mode, we could very well look at regulations by DOT to perhaps try and circumvent the problems that we are now dealing with.
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Mr. Warren, you said that you certainly subscribe to the highest quality of service with reference to consumers, as well as competitive mode as well. The policy that you suggested that you are either putting into place or you are going to review and to try to I guess mend in some way, what will it subscribe to in terms of consumer satisfaction? What would that policy tell us so that we would be assured that we will not have some of the incidents that we have seen of late, or recent, I should say?
Mr. WARREN. Being the very competitive industry that the airline industry is, they are vigorously looking internally to insure that instances like this, as Mr. Hirst indicated, and the various aspects of concern to this committee and to other committees, that those various areas are going to be addressed. I set them out in six different commitments to customer service that in fact the members of the Air Transport Association are committed to addressing.
I think that it goes, it is clear that what we do not want to have are the unintended consequences that may in fact impact and be an inconvenience to customers that in fact this bill may well inadvertently cause. For example, in the bill itself, it has a provision that the Secretary of Transportation has provided information on the issue of an undersold flight, which is less than 70 percent, when that flight is in fact canceled.
The problem that this raises is if in fact there are people, as I am sure all of us have experienced, that are waiting for a plane to depart, and there's a mechanical problem, airlines do their level best to try to re-book passengers on another flight, to make sure they get out and get to their destination earlier. If in fact you are going to penalize carriers for canceling a flight by having them report to the Secretary if it is less than 30 percent booked, that would discourage airlines from that re-booking practice. That is an unintended consequence that this bill suffers from, and there are others.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. But you are now trying to move or to revise a policy that will be, will speak better to the consumer satisfaction as before?
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Mr. WARREN. Yes. We are dedicated and committed to addressing customer concerns without the need for a legislation.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. And when you do this type of thing, sir, do we normally get a copy of that, or, Mr. Chairman, do we normally get a copy of these policies that have been revised by these types of agencies or organizations, once they have submitted that to DOT? Or is that the proper procedure? Either you or the Chairman.
Mr. WARREN. Each one of the individual carriers will of course address their own internal policies, and certainly, they are in a position to provide them, as Mr. Hirst has indicated he would be willing to provide such things to the committee regarding their change of policies in various areas that are of concern.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. The last question, Mr. Chairman, I have for Mr. Hirst. It was rather refreshing to hear, sir, that you did state that, let's see if I can get my notes on what you said there, you must keep passengers more informed as to inclement weather and the postponement or the delay in takeoffs, and you have not recovered well from problems.
I hope by your saying that your policy that you will be revising will then address or speak to those pronouncements that you have just made.
My question though is, given the fact that Northwest, it seems, I've been told, really has not had a practice, and anticipating the severity of stormy weather and certainly Detroit and the east coast areas do have a lot of that, I was once on the tarmac for four hours, and I was certainly a basket case by the time they did de-ice, are your policies going to speak about the unexpected weather, predictability of weather as well as probability of weather, sir?
Mr. HIRST. I would say, Congresswoman, we are a northern tier airline. We serve Mr. Oberstar's district, which is as far north as you can get without being Canadian. We are used to bad weather in the winter.
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We anticipate it pretty well. We have a full time meteorology department. They do a great job of predicting the weather. One of the things I've noticed on Northwest is that our guys seem to avoid clear air turbulence better than a lot of others.
Sometimes unusual weather events that are out of scale occur. That's really what happened that Saturday January 2nd in Detroit. It was just sort of an off-scale event.
Now, are we satisfied that we recovered well from it? No, we are not. And while individually I think our people behaved heroically as a company, we have gone through an extensive post-mortem to try to improve the way we would react to an unusual event like that.
I mentioned earlier some of the things we have done, we have designated a group of employees called a go team to go to any weather emergency from outside the system, so that they can compensate for the fact that some employees may not be able to get to work. With Detroit, we worked with the airport to update their snow removal plan so that it takes into account the development—
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. To update their plans?
Mr. HIRST. Their snow emergency plan, so that it takes into account changes that have occurred over the last few years to our hub, because the hub has grown dramatically in Detroit. We've improved procedures internally to try to avoid the kinds of congestion that developed.
We are trying to learn from it. I do emphasize, I've been in this business now for 22 years. I think a key to it is recovery from irregular operations, an area that hasn't received enough attention by all the major airlines. We are giving it a lot more attention, and I think consistent communication of information to people is really important.
I do not think our passengers expect us to not have delays and not have weather problems. They understand that happens. They do expect us to respond well to those, and we need to better.
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Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. And to respond rather expeditiously, sir, because certainly when you have someone sitting on a tarmac, as I am told, for 11 hours, you have not only a safety problem, but you have a health problem. Certainly the elderly, children and all would be averse to that type of delay.
I know LAX has a bus that transports folks when there is a gate change or when they are out of gates. We have a bus that comes and deplanes the passengers. Do you have this type of apparatus?
Mr. HIRST. Buses certainly can be used. In the case of the Detroit storm, there was so much snow still on the ground on Sunday that busing was rejected as an option until very late in the day, and it was thought, well, these gates really aren't going to open up. As Captain Gilroy said, people thought, sort of on a rolling basis, that gates would be freed up within an hour or two. As that time rolled on, we began thinking about more and more extreme things to do.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. So we have seen the worst of worst this last fall or this fall?
Mr. HIRST. I do believe so, yes.
Ms. MILLENDER-MCDONALD. Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask, the gentleman, Mr. Hirst did mention a letter, I think, from legal counsel, his counsel, stating that there were no improprieties. I think you mentioned that in your testimony, some letter. I would like to know if members of this committee can have such letter, and secondarily, if we have not gathered data as to how each airline has left passengers stranded, can we have such data submitted to us? And thank you.
Mr. DUNCAN. Yes, that letter is attached to the testimony.
Mr. HIRST. Yes, sir.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Mr. Menendez.
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Mr. MENENDEZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I believe many of us sitting on this committee know the importance of the airline industry to this country. One of the Nation's busiest airports, Newark International, is in my district. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in my State and my region exist because of air travel.
I am not simply speaking of those who work for the airlines or the airports. I am talking about manufacturers who rely on their sales people to travel to different parts of the country to sell their goods, about the service and technology industries that can send out technical teams to do presentations here in our own country or abroad.
Also, how it has an impact on our personal lives, allowing families to connect with loved ones.
It is for all of these reasons that taxpayers at every level, Federal, State and local, have invested so much capital in the infrastructure that allows airlines to operate. They've invested in airports, air traffic control, roads, and mass transit systems to get people to and from their flights among other things. They, in essence have to a large degree made this industry possible because they know how important it is.
It's the special support from taxpayers and the critical importance it has to our economic and personal lives that poses upon the industry a special responsibility.
What I am disappointed with--and I consider myself strongly supportive of the industry--what I am disappointed with except for one or two fleeting sentences, is that you have chosen, instead of leading the effort, to in fact simply, but for your one or two sentences, casting blame on some other entity.
All of us understand that air traffic control is an enormous problem. Most members of this committee--I would daresay all members of this committee--in a bipartisan way want to work very aggressively to help fund those realities that as we approach a new century of what we hope will be even more booming air traffic.
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But you know, some of us are concerned that anything we might do will have a consequence on cost, and unintended consequences. But I've got to be honest with you, I am disappointed in what I've heard today. I really do not believe that what I heard today is the industry coming up and saying, oh, yes, we are going to try to do better and give us something meaningful. I think it is to your discredit not to be out there leading on this issue for your own interest.
I'd like to just raise one or two questions. One of them is, Mr. Hirst, I read your statement as I was waiting here, and I believe the Chamber, as well, made a comment raising concerns that the economic penalty provisions in H.R. 700 could impact safety. My question is, are you implying that your airline or any other airline would ever cut corners on safety because of economic considerations? Because I do not know how else to read that statement.
Mr. HIRST. Congressman, no, obviously we do not cut corners on safety. It is a safe industry. Last year there was not a single fatality out of the 600 plus million people that were carried.
We carry 200,000 people every day.
Mr. MENENDEZ. So you would never cut corners on safety?
Mr. HIRST. No, sir. We do not believe it makes any sense to impose economic penalties on an airline for delays on the tarmac. Because we would never intentionally leave a plane sitting on the tarmac except for causes outside our control.
Mr. MENENDEZ. But Mr. Hirst, there's a difference between saying that, and saying, as I understand from your testimony, that if you would never cut corners on safety, as you've just told me, how can you also say that economic penalties could cause safety problems? You can not seem, to me, to have it both ways. One of those statements is true and correct, and one of them is not.
I want to believe that you are never going to, you or any other airline, is never going to cut safety issues, but by the same token, you can not suggest that maybe some of what has been suggested here is automatically going to create safety problems. It is one or the other.
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Mr. HIRST. I am very concerned about the economic consequences of many of the provisions of your bill. I must say I think some of the provisions are directed at problems that do not exist. Economic cancellation provision is directed at one of the great myths of the industry, if I may for a minute, Congressman.
We've all been in a situation where we are sitting, waiting for a flight and there may be 12 passengers at the gate, and then we hear that this flight's been canceled for mechanical reasons. The light goes on, and we say, aha, there are only 12 passengers on this flight, and that's why they canceled it. I've been there, you've been there, we've all been there.
Here's what really happens in that situation. There is a mechanical, on, say a DC-9 that's scheduled to leave the hub at 6:00 o'clock. Maybe the plane that took the mechanical had 90 passengers on it. There are 10 other DC-9s that are scheduled to leave at the same time.
Our planners look for the DC-9 that has the fewest passengers on it, because they know they're going to have to cancel one of these planes to inconvenience the fewest number of passengers. That's all that ever happens.
I've been in the business, as I said, for 22 years. I've never seen a flight canceled for economic reasons. And you have a provision in your bill that addresses that problem. It is a problem that doesn't exist.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Well, my concern is your statement and the statement of the Chamber that the economic impact penalty provisions could impact safety. I just want to make sure that what I heard in my answer is going to be the case with the industry, that you're not going to use that as a way in which you would ever cut corners on safety.
Mr. HIRST. Mr. Menendez—
Mr. MENENDEZ. I do not have enough time. So let me go on to ask you two other quick questions.
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You mentioned, Mr. Warren, in your testimony, I think it was one of the other previous answers that 5,800 consumer complaints out of 504 million passengers were filed with the DOT. Is that correct?
Mr. WARREN. It was 540 million passengers, of which in the top 10 carriers, it was 5,808 consumer complaints.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Now, how many complaints separate and apart from the DOT were filed with the airline industry itself?
Mr. WARREN. I do not have figures for that.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Does the airline industry keep figures for that?
Mr. WARREN. I am unaware of a central data base which has any figures to that effect.
Mr. MENENDEZ. To your knowledge, do your individual members keep those figures?
Mr. WARREN. I think there may be some record, but I am not at all clear as to whether or not—
Mr. MENENDEZ. One of the issues that concerns me are the comments in some of the testimony, where one of the witnesses said she spent over $200 and many hours on toll charges trying to register a complaint with the Department of Transportation. We've heard that some of the airlines do not have an 800 number for complaints. So I am not sure how reliable that 1 in 100,000 complaint record is.
If you can not give us the numbers, if there aren't 800 numbers to call the airlines, if you have a situation which those who are well informed have a difficult time in getting through to the Department of Transportation, and if we have no sense of what the airline industry on its own receives as direct complaints, how will we know what the true numbers are? I have never called the DOT, but I have called the airline that I travel. And they have been responsive.
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So it would seem to me this would be a broader registry and maybe a better sense of what the numbers are.
Lastly, let me just ask you one question. This issue was prior to us having a passenger bill of rights being considered by the committee. In the last Congress, I introduced legislation dealing with lost baggage. I know that is, for some of us, one of the most frustrating circumstances that can take place. The last time we dealt with this was in 1983. Sixteen years later, it seems to me that the value of everything has gone up.
At a minimum, do not you believe that it is fair to raise the amount on lost baggage?
Mr. WARREN. I think you have to look at it in context, here. You have the Amtrak liability, which is a Government relationship, in which the liability is $500 for baggage. What the DOT has done is set a floor of $1,250 and under the conditions of carriage, that is what the airlines have limited their liability to.
Mr. MENENDEZ. So I will assume that the answer to that is, no. In your opinion on behalf of your industry, you do not believe it should be raised?
Mr. WARREN. I am saying—
Mr. MENENDEZ. I'd like to hear a yes or no. Do you believe it should be raised, or should it not be raised?
Mr. WARREN. As with several things, there is no easy yes or no answer. It is a matter that carriers certainly are examining. I can not speak for the internal deliberations that carriers are giving to this particular issue.
It is a matter that is in the condition of carriage. The minimum is set by DOT. That, like many other issues, is seriously under consideration by carriers.
Mr. MENENDEZ. In closing, Mr. Chairman, it is tough to understand how you lose track of a 30 pound bag which might have some very significant value in terms of both the contents and other value to someone. I think we need to keep up with the times.
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Again, if all the industry is going to do is sit before this committee and just say, 'No, no, no, but we are going to try to do better.' I think you're going to end up with something you do not want. As someone who likes to be supportive of the industry, I am going to urge you to reconsider your views and your stance. Because you're going to end up with something that you really do not care for.
Thank you.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Mr. Lampson?
Mr. LAMPSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I had made some comments earlier about children traveling unaccompanied on aircraft. I want to thank you, Mr. Hirst, for sending us over a copy of your brochure yesterday. I commend you for having one, as well as for sending it to us.
I want to ask a couple of questions about how parents gain access, you may have made comments to this earlier, and I apologize if you have. Do they have to ask for it? Is it automatically given when a parent with a child comes up with a ticket?
Mr. HIRST. I know we have information available to parents in the form of brochures. I do not know if it is automatically sent to them when they call and arrange for a ticket or not. I can certainly find out the answer to that question.
Mr. LAMPSON. Would you please? I would appreciate knowing that.
And then for Mr. Warren, I think the number is about 20,000 children a day on various airlines traveling unaccompanied. Does each airline set its own policies for handling unaccompanied minors?
Mr. WARREN. To my knowledge, there are individual programs by each carrier as to how to address the unaccompanied minor problem. I would like to state that the carriers are working diligently to make sure that this issue is appropriately addressed.
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Mr. LAMPSON. Are you working to develop a standard? What I wanted to ask is, is there any industry-wide standard for handling unaccompanied children who fly and have to change planes?
Mr. WARREN. I think because of the different kinds of service and nature of that service that are provided by carriers that what is attempted to be accomplished is to find a type of program that best addresses the protection of the minor, as well as fit into the operational concerns of the carrier.
Mr. LAMPSON. Is there any requirement that there be an escort service in which a parent can either pay a fee to ensure their child, to ensure that an airline employee will escort the child toward a connecting flight? Is there any requirement?
Mr. HIRST. If I may, Mr. Lampson, at Northwest we require that a child traveling alone between the ages of 5 and 12 participate in our program. There is a fee for that. it is $30 one way on a non-stop flight, and $60 one way on a connecting flight. We do not accept children under the age of 5, and it is optional for children between 12 and 17.
Mr. LAMPSON. Are those fees explained to the parents at the time they purchase a ticket?
Mr. HIRST. To my knowledge, they are. I'll double check on that for you as well, sir.
Mr. LAMPSON. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, that's all the questions I have. Thank you very much.
Mr. DUNCAN. All right, thank you very much. Mr. Ehlers?
Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
No questions. I think you've heard enough questions, including all the softballs that Mr. DeFazio threw at you.
[Laughter.]
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Mr. EHLERS. I do have a couple of comments. First of all, you are experts at running airlines, or most of you are. That involves many different parameters, lots of different business experience, piloting experience, etc.
I think it would be a grave mistake for the Congress to try to direct you in ways, perhaps destructive ways, about how to run your business. At the same time, the members of Congress are experts about one aspect of your industry, and that is, the way you treat customers. Because virtually every member of Congress puts on many, many flying miles every year, experiences many different conditions from many different airlines.
Now, I will have to tell you, and I think I speak for virtually every member of Congress when I say you have problems in customer service. If you didn't, there would not be as many complaints that we are hearing and as many things would not have happened. The question is, how can we resolve that?
This may sound strange to you in view of the old joke that I am from the Federal Government and I am here to help you, but I think we can sincerely say that in this committee. We are trying to resolve a problem in a way that doesn't create a worse problem.
So I hope that the industry as a whole, not just you at the table, industry as a whole recognizes that there is a problem out there. Each of us could give you endless examples of really abominable practices that are taking place. Maybe they're not under your control, maybe it is simply a matter of not training employees well enough, maybe it is a problem of not screening employees well enough.
There are just many, many factors there. But I hope you're listening, and I hope you're coming up with positive proposals that we can consider, as well as the bills we have before us. I think it is something that we really both have to work on, not just for our good, not just for the people's good, but for everyone's good, including yours.
So take a more positive attitude. it is the old story, you do not have problems, you have challenges. It depends on how you handle those challenges. And I think you'll find that this committee, particularly under Chairman Duncan, who is one of the most fair-minded individuals I've ever seen, I think we earnestly want to come up with a bill, or with some solution that is good and that works and that benefits the public.
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The question is, how do we do that? Let's see what we can do.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Dr. Ehlers.
Unfortunately, I was hoping we could conclude with this panel, but we do have some members who wish to ask some additional questions, Mr. Oberstar and others. So we will have to take a brief break for this vote, and we will be back in just a few minutes. Thank you very much.
[Recess.]
Mr. DUNCAN. We'll go ahead and get started back with our hearing and ask the panel to take their seats once again.
While we are waiting on some of the other panelists, I'd like to ask Secretary Card and Mr. Warren to just tell me what, in your estimates, or your analyses of these various bills, what two or three requirements do you think would be the most costly to the airlines, or the most onerous or the most like re-regulation of the airlines? What do you think are the worst ideas, or the most dangerous?
Mr. CARD. I am not an expert on this legislation, Mr. Chairman. But I feel that the attractive but flawed interest in having significant financial penalties for not taking off within two hours, I think that would have unintended consequences, or could have unintended consequences.
There would be tremendous pressure on the carrier to have that plane leave within the two hour time frame. Yet the pilot might be in an awkward position where he has just de-iced and he was waiting in queue to take off, and he was coming up and it was 10 minutes to the two hour limit, and it was a question of, do I get back in the queue to get de-iced again, or take off to prevent the significant cost to the airline of having a delay of more than two hours?
I think that puts the pilot in a very awkward position, and it puts the ground movement of aircraft in a challenged position.
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So that would be one example where I think there might be unintended consequences. I think it is a flawed strategy, and it would end up costing consumers an awful lot, because it might invite a very litigious society to be even more litigious.
Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Warren?
Mr. WARREN. I think one of the primary concerns is what is in the legislation regarding back to back ticketing and hidden city ticketing. I think that would have a tremendously deleterious effect to the carriers. I think Mr. Hirst's submitted written testimony makes clear the impact that would have on the carriers.
I support very strongly Mr. Card's observations that you have basically a hint of regulatory scheme that is going to put under a microscope every decision which is made and have decisions which are made by crew the subject of an entire judicial, potentially an entire judicial review hearing.
Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Hirst, you weren't in here, but what I asked was, what provisions in these various bills did they think would be the most costly to the airlines or the most harmful or the hardest to comply with, that type of thing. I'll ask you that. I did hear Mr. Menendez say something about a statement in your testimony that the economic costs could have safety consequences, as if you would shortcut safety.
Of course, what I thought of was, if we do come up with things that are too costly to the airlines, then obviously they would not be able to buy new planes and new equipment as rapidly as they might otherwise. That certainly would have a safety, as Secretary Card said, an unintended safety consequence.
But what one or two provisions does Northwest Airlines think will be the most costly and the most difficult to comply with? Just curious.
Mr. HIRST. Mr. Duncan, I'll be glad to answer that. But I was impressed with one of the responses that Mr. Card made earlier, to the effect that a number of these provisions may make sense, or may make sense with modifications, they may be addressing a real problem, or there may be tradeoffs that make addressing the problem this way simply the wrong thing to do.
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The right approach here would be simply a notice and comment rulemaking process, and you would have these proposals offered in the form of proposed regulations at DOT, as opposed to legislation, which is very, very hard to change, and frankly, very hard to assess the impact of, because the process simply isn't designed the way rulemaking processes are, to elicit comments and address and assess tradeoffs.
The ticketing provisions, I think, I am now talking about our pricing people, are intended basically to lower fares between spoke cities and hub cities. But the effect, I believe, would be simply to raise fares, or Northwest believes, would be to raise fares in the connect markets. That is, the ticketing provisions would result in airlines tending to avoid the situation where competition has led to a lower fare in a connect market than in the spoke to hub market.
The provisions relating to excessive delays, I just can not imagine an airline intentionally leaving a plane on the tarmac when it could take off or bring the plane into a gate. You do not do that. When that happens, it happens because of an—and I am not trying to avoid responsibility—but it happens because things do happen that we can not control.
Weather related or ATC related delays cause these queues to develop, particularly on takeoff. I do not think the passengers on one of these flights that would come up against this two hour window would prefer to have the flight go back to the gate and unload, rather than sit in line for a bit longer and perhaps get released.
So I really think Mr. Card's approach here is worth considering for a number of these provisions.
Mr. DUNCAN. Let me ask you this, I asked Mr. Warren a while ago, he mentioned the 5,800 complaints to the Department of Transportation. I think most people, if they have a problem with an airline, they're going to complain to the airline. I am sure that Northwest gets some complaints, and probably pretty consistent with all the other airlines. Do you know how many complaints Northwest Airlines received last year?
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Mr. HIRST. I am sorry, I don't, sir. I will find the answer.
Mr. DUNCAN. I know you did say you were considering installing a 1-800 number. I do think that whatever else we would do, we should make it easier for passengers to know how to complain, whether it is to the Department of Transportation or somebody else.
Mr. HIRST. I agree with that. And I think it is in the airline's interest to encourage it. Because it gives us feedback from our customers.
Mr. DUNCAN. Dr. Ehlers made, I think, a good statement a while ago in saying that he hoped that the airlines would regard these legislative initiatives as a wake-up call. This is not my legislation, it is Chairman Shuster's and some others, Mr. Dingell, Mr. DeFazio and others. But there has been a tremendous amount of interest in these various bills.
Have you gotten a wake-up call from these bills?
Mr. HIRST. We understand that there is an enormous amount of frustration out there about air travel. And I'd be glad to talk to you in detail about what may be—
Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Warren, let me ask you this. Do you think in your representation of the other airlines, do you think they've gotten some kind of message from these hearings and these legislative proposals?
Mr. WARREN. I absolutely believe that they do. I know that senior management and CEOs are working very hard to see how they can best address the issues that are raised by this legislation and other pieces of legislation that have been offered. We very much want to work to try to resolve these customer concerns.
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much. Mr. Oberstar?
Mr. OBERSTAR. I think it was Shakespeare who wrote the line that includes the phrase, the winter of my discontent. Surely that could be said of this winter.
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It also could have been said of the winter of 1994. I arrived with my wife at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in early January, 1994. It was the day the Governor, for the first time in the history of the State, closed all the schools in the State. It was 70 below zero. All my life, growing up in Minnesota, nobody had ever closed a school.
The Governor closed the schools, afraid kids might freeze waiting for buses. Well, hell, we didn't have buses when I was a kid, we walked to school, we kept warm walking.
But that particular day, Northwest had 65 aircraft on the ground at Minneapolis-St. Paul. Two of them were operative. All the others had their hydraulic systems frozen. There was nothing Northwest could do about that, nothing anybody could do except maybe set up some great, huge fans and blow the cold away.
This was indeed a storm of storms. But before I get to that, I do have to take issue with a couple of things that my good friend Mr. Card said. He said, oh, well, you shouldn't just react to anecdotal accounts. This is not an anecdotal account. This is the monthly report by the Department of Transportation on regularly scheduled flights canceled 5 percent or more of the time. There are many bases for action other than, I think you're right, we shouldn't act on anecdotal accounts. But there are substantial bases for action.
You also said Congress should not enact burdensome regulatory legislation. And I said in my opening remarks at the hearings last week, airlines have an opportunity to cleanup their acts, respond to these problems. But if they don't, consumer pressure, you heard it from a whole panoply of members, consumer pleas to members of Congress is going to require action.
But if you do not think we should act, then do you think the Department should act? Do you think the Department should use its regulatory authority that I cited earlier from the CAB Sunset Act of 1984, when the Act continued with the Department, the authority the CAB held on overbooking, denied boarding compensation, limitations on liability for lost or damaged baggage, smoking we've dealt with by legislation. Handicap, charter service terms, contractual terms between the passenger and the carrier, do you think things like that are appropriate regulatory actions for the DOT to exercise?
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Mr. CARD. Congressman Oberstar, you remember when I was at the Department of Transportation, we had a lot of communication back and forth. The wise advice that came from members of Congress and the wise counsel that came through hearings like this was always received at the Department of Transportation. I can not say it was always well received.
But I was certainly on the receiving end of many Dingell-grams, and they suggested a lot of action the Department of Transportation might take without Congressional statutory response. I do think it is appropriate for the Department of Transportation to consider regulatory changes, under the process provided by law, that say there should be comment periods and reactions and due deliberation, before any regulation takes effect.
So I am not suggesting that Government should step back and do nothing. I am suggesting that Congress might not want to build a box that is so small that it doesn't solve the problem, and that Congress should rightfully encourage the Department of Transportation to take its responsibility. The Secretary of Transportation has specific responsibility under 49 U.S.C. Section 411, it was when I was there, and 40172 now or whatever, to be able to jump into these situations and consider ramifications.
When I was there, there was a great debate over the computer reservation systems. We solved that, maybe not to everyone's satisfaction, but we tried to solve it.
Mr. OBERSTAR. You made progress. Considerable progress.
Mr. CARD. I think it is appropriate for Congress to highlight challenges that may best be resolved within the Department of Transportation.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Card.
I also want to dispel the concerns that some might have about some aspects of the pending legislation on reporting on-time departures, on-time arrivals and all the rest, that was suggested by someone in the course of this hearing, that there might be pressure to leave the gate under circumstances when that would not be advisable.
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I would just recall, first, an aircraft cannot push back from the gate unless first cleared by the tower to do so, except at a few major airports where the flight deck crew has authority to push back to a very limited geographic area within the gate area. They cannot actively move it to a taxiway without further clearance from the tower.
Secondly, we have only to think back to the tragedy of Air Florida here in Washington, it was a snowy day, unusually heavy, wet snow, aircraft were lined up for quite a long period of time, about an hour plus. Finally, the runway had been cleared, the tower was told to notify aircraft that they could prepare to depart. Air Florida happened to be first in line that day. Second in line was a Republic aircraft and third in line was a Northwest aircraft.
Both of those aircraft departed the line, went back to the gate to be de-iced. The flight deck crew exercised the kind of judgment we expect of them to take safety precautions necessary. I suggest that that culture of safety will prevail in the future.
In retrospect, well, first of all I just wanted to say, Mr. Hirst, that your full statement, which I have read through last night and highlighted a number of things, is in effect a very fine response to the concerns of the committee. it is the company's answer to a number of concerns that have been raised. Rebuttal I guess to last week's testimony.
But in retrospect, would you say it was penny foolish of Northwest to house two kids in the same room, when for $60 additional you could have put them in separate rooms?
Mr. HIRST. It wasn't done for economic reasons, Congressman. The six year old boy was afraid to be alone. And those have been the only circumstances in the past, when we've housed kids together, it is when one of them have requested it. What happened in this case was that the company went and asked the parents of both kids whether or not they thought it was a good idea, they agreed to it, and we did.
It wasn't for economic reasons, sir.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. Well, would you do it again?
Mr. HIRST. No. We do not—
Mr. OBERSTAR. You've changed the policy?
Mr. HIRST. We've changed the policy.
Mr. OBERSTAR. A hundred twenty-five thousand unaccompanied minors Northwest carried last year?
Mr. HIRST. One hundred twenty thousand.
Mr. OBERSTAR. One hundred twenty thousand?
Mr. HIRST. Yes, sir.
Mr. OBERSTAR. And this was the only problem that reached the case of a dispute where legal intervention was required?
Mr. HIRST. It is the only one that has any allegations of this nature. Obviously, there are bound to be some problems of some kind when you deal with that number of individuals. But this is the only incident of this kind that has been alleged.
Mr. OBERSTAR. The WCCO report, which was aired before the committee last week, did show other instances. I must say that since that occurrence, since that TV report, I had observed just casually, just accidentally, as I had been passing through several in that category, unaccompanied minors, religiously followed and accompanied by a Northwest agent. That's as it should be.
Mr. HIRST. I think the WCCO report was made at a time when we were still expecting customer service agents who had other duties to attend to these kids. And we've changed that policy as well.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Have you put your people through a training program?
Mr. HIRST. Oh, yes. They are trained, again, Susan Baumeister is here, who could describe it to you in some detail. Yes, they are trained specifically for these duties. Her duties, along with the other 300 QSAs, places first priority on dealing with unaccompanied minors.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. I want to talk about the Detroit airport situation. In the aftermath of that incident, I think the following Monday, I called the county executive, called the airport director, and heard this side of the story, that 11 of 12 Detroit airport snow plow operators showed up for work. One was unable to be there, his wife was delivering a baby, he was at the hospital with her. Eleven of their 12. Northwest could not get its snow plow operators out.
Why is this significant? Because under your agreement with Detroit, the airline accepts sole responsibility for clearing snow at the gate, under the parking area for the aircraft and up to the alley. That's your contract with Detroit. You do not have the same arrangement with Minneapolis-St. Paul. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, the airport authority, through whatever agreement with Northwest, does all the snow plow clearing.
Now, if that continues to be your practice, and I do not question it, it is just that that's your practice, then have you put in place a plan to assure that Northwest's snow plow operators or people responsible for clearing snow under the aircraft and at the gate will have a means of getting to the airport in worst weather conditions? It seems to me simple snow is not new. It is not news, and it is not new in Detroit, Minneapolis, or any of the other places Northwest serves. It seems to me you should assure that they had a four wheel drive vehicle, a HumVee, a snowmobile, a sled dog or something to get them to the airport.
Mr. HIRST. Congressman Oberstar, I had not heard that story. My understanding is that the county is responsible for plowing into the throats between the concourses at Detroit. The problem was that because we had no other place to park our planes, they were clogged with planes and we had no other place to put our ground equipment. Ground equipment was clogging those throats, so that their plows couldn't get in.
When we tried to move the ground equipment, we found that a lot of it had frozen, just frozen solid and would not start. There were many problems.
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I'd be glad to look into the details on that and see if that story held up. But I had not heard that in all the time I have spent on this.
Mr. OBERSTAR. That's what I was told by the director of the airport, the county executive. It seemed rather strange to me that Northwest did not have a plan in place.
Mr. HIRST. It doesn't sound right.
Mr. OBERSTAR. For snow plow operators, if that is not an inaccurate portrayal to me, then I would hope that in your recovery plan that you would have such a proposal.
Mr. HIRST. We have looked very, very closely at our recovery plan. We have gone through it with a fine toothed comb. We've done the same with the county.
I think in the first couple of days after this disaster, there were a lot of stories that went back and forth between the county and Northwest, and some finger pointing. Some of them, I think on both sides, turned out not to be very accurate. I'd be glad to look into this one and see what steps we have taken.
I know that the county held their snow plow crews overnight in anticipation of the storm. That's why they had as much turnout as they did.
Mr. OBERSTAR. In a snow of this magnitude, you have said you have very good weather reporting capability. I know that, I've toured the facility, I know your relationship formally between Northwest and Cavortis. In fact, I have availed myself of that capability on Saturday nights and Sunday morning. Of course, in the Washington area, six snowflakes sighted east of the Alleghenies puts this area into a panic. I was quite sure it would not be as bad as they predicted.
Nonetheless, I called the 1-800 number on my gold card, and got a very thorough weather report from a wonderful agent who had information right down to the temperature, and she was correct what the air temperature would be at takeoff time, 2:15 p.m. Sunday, 41 degrees. It was 40 degrees, in fact, prediction on Saturday night.
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So given that kind of information, how was it that your folks failed to assess the magnitude of this storm, when you knew in advance that up to two inches an hour were going to be coming down? You started canceling 25 inbound flights, diverted another 34 flights. What was it, what happened in that period of time? Was it a judgment call? Do you have meteorological information to show that this storm was in fact substantially more severe than your own weather predictors?
Mr. HIRST. I do not think anybody anticipated until just before it occurred that you would have two inches of snow an hour falling over a three hour period on Saturday afternoon. That's a very unusual rate of snowfall, it is beyond what the airport there can handle.
We also discovered, and perhaps we should have known this, but we discovered that the snow removal plan did not include our remote de-ice pad, and so that afternoon a negotiation ensued between Northwest and the county trying to get the de-ice pad plowed out. That contributed to the queue of airplanes that were waiting to be de-iced when the extreme weather hit.
Then we had whiteout for several hours. It was so extreme on Saturday that our de-ice manager and tower manager were curious, they wanted to know what was going on out at that pad. They got into a four wheel drive vehicle and tried to drive out to the pad. It took them two hours to do it, fighting snow drifts and whiteout.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Well, it is like the Corps of Engineers builds structures to protect citizens from the 100 year, 200 year, 500 year flood. In North Dakota, at Grand Forks, the citizens complained that the flood wall was too high when it was built. It was an ugly structure, terrible.
Then when the flood of two years ago hit, they said it wasn't big enough. Well, you've been flying in bad weather a long time, and your predecessor, your partner airline that you acquired, Republic, maybe just as long with its predecessor, North Central Airlines. You've just got to have plans in place. I think it would be useful to submit to the committee the point by point steps that have been taken to deal with the situation.
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I know you've appointed a president for Northwest operations at Detroit, a president for Detroit operations of Northwest, the former president of Alaska Airlines. I think that's a good step. Fix his responsibility locally. There are many other heroic stories of Northwest personnel going home, taking food out of their refrigerators to bring it back to the airport for passengers and colleagues who were stranded.
Mr. HIRST. Larry Scott did that.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Those are great stories. But overall, this carrier has a responsibility to its personnel, to its passengers, to have in place plans to deal with circumstances like this. We expect it of you. And you should tell us what those plans are.
Mr. HIRST. We'd be happy to submit those to you, Mr. Oberstar. They exist, and we will send them to you.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SWEENEY [ASSUMING CHAIR]. Thank you, Mr. Oberstar.
Mr. Duncan had to step out to attend another hearing, so I am sure it gives the panel some great comfort that I am able to sit in on the Chair spot. Mr. Lipinski has not had an opportunity to ask questions. I know Mr. DeFazio has some follow-up questions. But in fairness, we'll go to Mr. Lipinski so he can ask his first round.
Mr. LIPINSKI. What I am going to do is, since my friend Mr. DeFazio has to go over and give a one minute speech on the Floor, I am going to give him my five minutes, then the Chair will have his, then he can come back and give me mine.
Mr. DEFAZIO. That is extraordinarily generous, and I know, Bill, you'll write it down in your little book of favors you've granted me, the way Chicago politicians always do.
[Laughter.]
Mr. DEFAZIO. Some day the bill will come due.
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Thank you, I do have some follow-up questions. We touched on briefly the issue of a complaint line, Mr. Warren said that, as far as he knows, the airlines might or might not keep track of their complaints, but there is no compilation of those complaints. And Mr. Hirst referenced that his airline is considering having a 1-800 number for complaints, which I would certainly applaud.
Let me just relate my experience to Mr. Warren and to Mr. Hirst, thinking about this. I am a fairly sophisticated airline traveler. Twelve years on this committee, almost 2 million miles since I've been in Congress. Seen a lot, do not know everything but have seen a lot. One of United's lifetime, 1K members, that's great, I am one of their best customers.
So the last time I was aggrieved by United, I couldn't figure out who I should call. It is not on the ticket jacket, not on the ticket, not in anything I've been given by United. So I called the 1K desk, the special desk for their best customers, the one half of 1 percent of people who always fly more than 100,000 miles a year.
Know what they said? They said, we do not take complaints here. So they said, but we have a phone number for you, not an 800 number, in Chicago. I said, okay, great, give me that. I've got a WATS line, I'll call them.
So they give me the number in Chicago. Well, I called the number in Chicago. Guess what? First we go through the labyrinth of some sort of voice mail system, and then what? we are put on interminable hold. Twenty-five minutes later, I hung up. I guess they probably didn't record me as a complaint.
I would suggest that the airlines can do better. And I am going to give you two options, see which one you like better. Option number one, we require that DOT have a 1-800 number. Now, they do not have enough money to do it, so I've figured it out.
If we charge for every passenger segment the 500 and whatever million we mentioned per year, one penny, and I have yet to meet an airline traveler who would not pay a penny to have someone answer their complaints, I am sure you can survey all your customers, and say, would you mind paying a penny more on your next flight, so that you could have someone who would take and act on your complaint? They would say, absolutely, I guarantee it. But do a survey if you do not believe me.
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So we could go to DOT, we'd probably have to add a penny onto the ticket tax or something to pay for the staffing over there, because they're afraid that they will get so many, they estimate that the complaints would be many times more than they get now. So we are talking maybe a million complaints is their estimate on what they would receive, they need a few people to answer those responsively.
So one option is, the Government does it. The other option is, the airlines do it. And Mr. Hirst is already kind of headed down that road.
But I would suggest sort of a further step, that the airlines be required to do it. They should be required to publish the number on the ticket jacket or the ticket. And that they be required, within a certain category, to compile those complaints and submit them to DOT for posting, along with the other passenger information. If we are going to have free markets, Mr. Card, people need information. If I do not have the slightest idea how many people have complained about crummy service from a certain airline in the last year, I do not have the information I need as a consumer to compare their ticket to someone else's that's identically priced.
So which way do we think would work better?
Mr. CARD. You're asking me?
Mr. DEFAZIO. Anyone who wants to volunteer.
Mr. CARD. Members of Congress, I am sure, keep track of complaints that come to them as well. I am a former politician, I served in a legislative body, worked in the executive branch of Government. We received a lot of complaints, and I didn't have a 1-800 number for people to call into, but they still found me.
I do not know that Government has the best ability to be the collector of all complaints. I do favor the corporate competitiveness generating a chance for customers to complain to Northwest or to American or to Delta or any other the other carriers. I am not looking to build a bigger Government, that's my philosophical view. That is a statement that does not represent the Chamber's view, necessarily.
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Mr. DEFAZIO. I do not want to cut too much of your time, that's a fair response. But I would just relate my story, and I am sure, Mr. Hirst, that frequent travelers have the same. There is no readily apparent way to complain to the faceless organization.
Mr. HIRST. I do not think there's any—
Mr. DEFAZIO. And I do not want to take it out on the flight attendant or the pilot, because they aren't the ones I want to be complaining to.
Mr. HIRST. I do not think there's any excuse for what you experienced. I am not speaking for United, but if that's the kind of response we give to our best customers, we do not deserve to be in business, and we've got to fix it.
Mr. DEFAZIO. Someone who is candid, who worked for United told me, well, we used to have someone who was a vice president who was in charge of customer relations and complaints, but they eliminated that position and it is now the janitor or somebody in headquarters who handles it. There's no one they could identify. They couldn't give me the name of a person who is principally responsible.
So that means they do not put much emphasis on it. I would suggest this as an extraordinary competitive advantage for your airline, and if we get into a bidding war as to who has the best 1-800 number in customer service and complaint resolutions, I think you'd attract some passengers.
My time is about up, so let me just give you a couple of quotes here. This is like, see who's up on their reading, if you can guess where these quotes are from. The carriers may be deluding themselves with their own Panglossian view of the economic success of airline deregulation, all's for the best in this, the freest of all markets for air travel. Anyone who has flown very much at all in the United States has likely felt abused, refused, or misused perhaps repeatedly.
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Then finally, if the airline industry is to head that off, speaking of Government intervention and regulation, which Mr. Card certainly wants to do, and I think the rest of you do, it needs to come up with a meaningful passenger bill of rights of its own.
Then they refer to the ATA as taking the lead on this. And they would be wise to go beyond this, though, and define minimum standards for full service airlines that would address matters beyond regulations and passenger rights. They could spell out such things as minimum seat pitch, I had 11 inches last week, and carry-on baggage rules and cabin service standards.
Okay, who knows who wrote this editorial this week?
Mr. CARD. Wall Street Journal.
Mr. DEFAZIO. Close. That was very good. And they may get to it. It was Aviation Week, who does not normally wax eloquent on these things.
I thank the Chairman, I thank the ranking member for their indulgence. I am going to argue about something else somewhere else.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Mr. DeFazio.
I'd like to just follow up briefly, because I was going to ask a couple of questions along the same line. Maybe it is more in the sense of an observation. Mr. Hirst, Mr. Warren, you've said there are provisions within H.R. 700 that do not solve problems that exist. Those statements would have greater credibility if you were able to come before this committee with more precise information on just how you handle complaints, and how many you have, and those basic numbers.
The fact that you do not suggests to members of this committee that your intentions are misdirected or you do not care. So let me suggest that you need to do a lot of work in that area to restore some confidence.
With that, I will turn it over to the ranking member, Mr. Lipinski.
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Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Mr. Card, you said that you were in favor of taking the aviation trust fund off budget. Are you in favor of increasing the PFC from $3 to $6?
Mr. CARD. First of all, my comments are on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. My personal views may be a little different than the Chamber's views. But we favor taking the trust fund off budget, we favor spending the trust fund resources to improve the infrastructure. We have no position with regard to the increases in PFCs. The passenger facility charges came into existence just prior to my becoming Secretary of Transportation. I am very familiar with the issue.
The Chamber does not have a position on the passenger facility charge issue.
Mr. LIPINSKI. The reason I ask you that question is because in your testimony, you talk quite a bit about the fact that the traffic control system is outdated, the air traffic controllers are overworked. All those things may very well have truth to them.
But one of the reasons for it is the fact that we can not utilize all the money out of the Aviation Trust Fund, but nobody really believes that even if we were to utilize all of that, we would still be able to do everything that needs to be done. That's why we need an increase in the PFC from $3 to $6, and that's why I was asking you that question. But you say your organization doesn't have a position on that.
It seems to me in your testimony this morning and this afternoon that you are certainly in favor of the corporations moving to correct any deficiencies that they have. And I can understand that, you're a free market man. You also seem to be in favor of, if there are any problems that the corporations do not address, that the Department of Transportation address. You do seem to be very much, though, opposed to this committee, this Congress, passing into law any items that we think might correct the situation. Do I read your position correctly?
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Mr. CARD. I guess it goes to the specificity or the micromanagement that might come to a statute. I do not oppose general statutory language that might increase the ability of the Department of Transportation to address a particular need.
But I think it would be a mistake for the committee or Congress in general to fix one particular problem without having the benefit of input from all of those that might be affected by the solution. They could be carriers, they could be customers, they could be service providers. And the Department of Transportation, under the regulatory regime, consistent with the mandate that Congress imposed, has a regulatory procedure that obligates them to listen to all parties before they make a final decision. I think that would be absent if Congress were to try to solve a particular problem with the very narrowly crafted legislative agenda.
So I favor Congress, in its ability to have oversight over the process, I encourage Congress to communicate with the executive branch in these areas of common concern, to motivate them, if you will. I am not opposed to these hearings, for example, I think they are worthy. But I do not think all of the solutions that are suggested in a statutory response will live up to the expectations, three, four, five years from now. And it might be very difficult to change the statutory response if it is not appropriate.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Well, it seems to me that you are assuming that we do not solicit the opinion from all sectors of the aviation industry, when you make a statement such as that. We are soliciting your opinion here today, we solicited the opinion of the consumers last week. You can rest assured that if I do not solicit the opinion of United Airlines and American Airlines and Delta Airlines, they'll be in to give me their opinion.
We are in almost continual contact with the Department of Transportation. So I really do not believe that us acting will be in a manner that is shortsighted and not take everyone's views and everyone's consideration into effect and into our deliberations.
I have to also say that the carriers have had a long, when it gets to the level that we are holding these types of hearings, and we are moving in a direction with this type of legislation, it is because in reality the abuses, perceived, at least, by the public, have become so great and the carriers have done nothing about it, and for one reason or another, the Department of Transportation has done nothing about it, that's when it gets to our level. That's really when we are motivated to move to do something.
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I wanted to ask Mr. Warren, in regard to your testimony, you talked about the use of a single flight number to put U.S. carriers at a competitive disadvantage because of slot controls at foreign airports. Could you amplify that? I do not really understand exactly what you mean there.
Mr. WARREN. Yes, when you have a single flight number, that connotes that you only have one aircraft that would be going from location, let's say from New York to London and on to Paris. That would not enable that particular carrier to use different gauge for—
Mr. LIPINSKI. I am sorry, a different what?
Mr. WARREN. A different plane for that passenger who boarded in New York, went to London and was going on to Paris. It would force the carrier to have the same kind of airplane or the same airplane to go from the London to Paris leg, and therefore put, and not use a more economical aircraft for a shorter route. Therefore, put us, put our carriers, the U.S. carriers, at a competitive disadvantage.
Mr. LIPINSKI. I do not know why it would force them to do that, though. Why couldn't, first of all, there may be some flights that go from New York to London and then to Paris, I do not happen to be familiar with any of those. But there may be. But I do not understand why you couldn't fly one type of plane from Chicago to London and then fly another type of plane into Paris. You talk about somehow the slot controls at foreign airports creating a problem for us. If it creates a problem for us, I would assume it would create a problem for foreign carriers coming the other way, would not it?
Mr. WARREN. It may not. You may have a situation where you have a foreign air carrier who is able to have a single flight number that would fly into New York and then through other means be able to transport that passenger from an overseas market inland to the United States and still have a single flight number for that passenger, giving the impression, or representing that that is in fact the kind of customer service that that particular passenger can get, and U.S. carriers would therefore be put at a disadvantage.
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Mr. LIPINSKI. Well, it seems to me that that should be covered in any bilateral agreements that we have with countries. I realize the bilateral agreement we have with England, the example you're using is not the biggest bilateral in the world as far as we are concerned. But we have nothing with France at all with regard to bilaterals.
Mr. WARREN. I think the first case that dealt with the whole question of single flight number and the bilateral issue was raised within the French context. That was a reported case back in 1978, where the U.S. did, was able to assert its authority in being able to have a single flight number and change of gauge.
Mr. LIPINSKI. We do not have a bilateral with France any longer.
Mr. HIRST. Mr. Lipinski, I think there may be some problems in the fifth freedom markets as well.
Mr. LIPINSKI. In the what?
Mr. HIRST. In the fifth freedom markets.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Okay.
Mr. HIRST. For example, Northwest and United operate flights to Tokyo, and then we operate flights beyond Tokyo to points in Asia and we carry local traffic from Tokyo to these points in Asia and back and forth on what's called a fifth freedom basis. The theory there is that that traffic makes economically feasible a flight that originates in the U.S. and ends in that destination point.
Those are normally designated with a single flight number. And if we can not do that, then we will have some kind of a problem, and I do not know how to predict what the magnitude of it would be. But we do change gauge at Tokyo, and we do have single flight numbers that are the basis for our ability to operate and carry fifth freedom traffic onto those Asian points.
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Mr. LIPINSKI. I am very interested in international aviation, because I believe the Congress should be involved in any bilaterals that are agreed to by the Department of Transportation. Of course, the Department of Transportation doesn't agree with me, and they're sitting over there smiling, and I am sure all the air carriers do not agree with me, either. But there will come a day when the United States Congress will have a hand in it.
Mr. LIPINSKI. I appreciate your amplifying that, Mr. Hirst. I still do not see what the problem is going to be, to be perfectly frank with you. But at another time, we will cover that.
Mr. Hirst, talking about the situation in Detroit, first of all, you were in Minneapolis during this time, correct?
Mr. HIRST. Me personally?
Mr. LIPINSKI. Yes.
Mr. HIRST. Yes, I was, sir.
Mr. LIPINSKI. And Captain, you left Detroit Saturday morning and you didn't come back to Detroit—or was it Friday?
Captain GILROY. Saturday I left Detroit.
Mr. LIPINSKI. When a couple of snow flurries were coming down.
Captain GILROY. It was snowing pretty good when I actually departed Detroit on a Saturday.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Now, you're changing your testimony—no, Captain, I am only kidding. You said a few snow flurries, but I know you were parked under cover, instead of the employee parking lot, and it was a wise decision.
But you didn't come back until Sunday at 2:35, correct?
Captain GILROY. That's correct.
Mr. LIPINSKI. So in reality, neither one of you gentlemen were actually at the Detroit airport during 90 percent of the blizzard that hit you, correct? I mean, you were in Newark most of the time and you were in Minneapolis. The only reason I say that is because it is my opinion that we would have been better off having some people here to testify from Northwest Airlines that were actually on the ground during the height of the blizzard, rather than having someone who was in Minnesota and someone who was in Newark the vast majority of the time.
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Now, you landed at 2:35. How long did you sit on the runway?
Captain GILROY. My flight was a little unique. As I mentioned, we had a medical emergency, so we were able to arrive at a gate within one hour.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Okay. Do you have any idea, or Mr. Hirst, do you have any idea of how long planes that may, that you may have gone ahead of, had been sitting on that runway?
Mr. HIRST. I am sorry, I do not understand the question.
Mr. LIPINSKI. There were obviously a number of other planes that had landed in Detroit, and were seeking a gate to unload their passengers. Before the captain's plane landed, I am just trying to get an idea how many planes he got ahead of, because they had a possible heart attack victim on the plane.
Mr. HIRST. Well, there were a lot of variables determining which planes got to the gate when. It wasn't just sort of who landed first. Some of the gates would only accommodate certain aircraft. In particular, as I understand it, we had a number of 757s on the ground, and we had a hard time clearing gates for 757s. So people who were on those aircraft tended to stay on the ground longer than others.
If Captain Gilroy landed at 2:30 or so—
Captain GILROY. Yes, sir, 2:35.
Mr. HIRST. That was toward the end of the period when we were accepting planes coming in.
Mr. LIPINSKI. How many gates do you operate at Detroit?
Mr. HIRST. Fifty-two.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Fifty-two gates. And I believe you testified earlier that normally, overnight, you have 35 planes on the ground?
Mr. HIRST. Yes, 35 to 38 planes.
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Mr. LIPINSKI. And you had, I believe you testified, 68 planes on the ground Saturday night?
Mr. HIRST. That's right.
Mr. LIPINSKI. So you were right there, you had 16 planes that had no gates?
Mr. HIRST. Yes, a couple more, because I think a couple of the gates were inoperable.
Mr. LIPINSKI. And it is possible that some of the gates couldn't accommodate some of the planes?
Mr. HIRST. That's correct.
Mr. LIPINSKI. And you say that if you had one decision back, the decision to open up the airport on Saturday, you would certainly like to make that once again.
I have to tell you, listening to all of this and reading all the testimony, I really do not understand how, with 68 planes on the ground, when you normally only have 38 on the ground, and when you have 16 planes at least that do not have a gate, how you could open up flights coming into that airport again. Thirty-nine flights? it is inconceivable to me that that decision could have been made.
I realize you thought that the weather was going to clear up. But it would seem to me that you would want to get at least half your fleet out of Detroit before you accepted another plane coming in there.
Mr. HIRST. The 39 flights that came in, they were a third, maybe a quarter of what normally would have come in on a Sunday afternoon. That's basically one bank, and we would normally be operating three to four banks over that period of time. So it was substantially thin.
As Captain Gilroy said, and others have told me, I think the people who were running the airport were constantly of the view that they would be freeing up enough gates to move these planes in within a two hour period and just one problem was added to the next.
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We had overnight, Saturday night, about, well, we had about 2,500 people who were in the airport overnight. We acquired, I was told, about 1,400 hotel rooms that night for stranded passengers, many of which Northwest paid for, although we are not required to do it in the event of a weather problem. So we had some 4,000 people who were stranded who needed to be moved out. And we had many, many other people who were trying to get back to Detroit from other places.
So the people who were managing this problem, who were doing planning, had to balance all those pressures against the concerns about when the gates would be available, and they made some judgments that seem, in retrospect, to have been wrong, but at the time seemed reasonable.
Mr. LIPINSKI. When you were allowing these 39 flights to come in Sunday, how many flights were you releasing out of Detroit, do you know?
Mr. HIRST. During that period of time?
Mr. LIPINSKI. Yes.
Mr. HIRST. I think they were being released as they could be pushed off the gate. I do not know the number that would have left during that period, no, sir. I can find that out.
Mr. LIPINSKI. I would be interested in getting that information.
My outstanding staff here has informed me that I missed the boat in regard to U.S.-French bilaterals. There was one signed in 1998. But you see, if the United States Congress was involved in these bilaterals, I would have known that.
[Laughter.]
Mr. LIPINSKI. The Department of Transportation slid that one right by me without notifying me. But as I say, in the future, that won't happen.
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I want to get into my favorite area, and I'll try to hold it down to only a few minutes. But it is economic cancellations. Now, in your statement, Mr. Hirst, economic cancellations takes up about two-thirds of this page. You're talking about there is no such thing, so we shouldn't put anything into legislation.
Mr. HIRST. Right.
Mr. LIPINSKI. I am not highlighting you, because I have talked to Bob Crandall, when he ran American Airlines, and he would go on for hours telling me how there's no economic cancellation. And I've talked to Mr. Wolf about it, Mr. Greenwald about it, I have talked to the new gentleman that runs Delta Airlines. Everybody can go on incessantly talking about the fact that there are no economic cancellations.
And there is that old adage about, he who protests too much. There may not be any economic cancellations. But the only people that I have ever met in this world who believe that are the people who run airlines.
Mr. HIRST. I understand why people think otherwise. I do. It is because, as I was mentioning earlier, we've all had this experience, that flight that gets canceled, it always seems like there are only about a dozen people who are booked on that flight. And you think, okay, the reason they canceled this flight is they looked at this load, they knew they were going to lose money and they're not going to operate it.
But what really happens is, that flight is operating at a hub, in a bank. And if it is planned to be operated with a DC-9 aircraft, there are probably 20 other planes that were going to leave at the same time using a DC-9. When one of those DC-9s develops a mechanical, you do not automatically cancel the flight, or the mission that plane was scheduled to operate. What you do is you look at all 20 of the DC-9 scheduled operations, and you find the one that has the fewest number of passengers, and you cancel it.
So it may be that the plane that was intended to go on your trip, there's nothing wrong with it. What's happened is, there was something wrong with another DC-9 on a flight that had more passengers booked on it, and we make the decision to move your plane to that flight, because that way we inconvenience fewer passengers. That's what happens.
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Mr. LIPINSKI. Yes, that's what they say.
[Laughter.]
Mr. LIPINSKI. Obviously, I do not agree with you. But you gentlemen have all been here a very, very long time. I do not know if the Chairman has any more questions for you. But I appreciate your being here.
I just want to say, though, in conclusion, that I would recommend to you all that all aspects of the aviation industry should contact all members of this committee, because under the leadership of Chairman Shuster, this legislation is rolling forward. He moves quicker than George Patton, so I strongly suggest that everyone contact members of the committee, give us your input so we can write legislation that won't harm anyone, but will help the American flying public.
Thank you very much.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Mr. Lipinski. And I do not believe we have any more questions.
I want to as well thank the members of the panel for your testimony. I know it is been a long, long day, and a little bit of a rough road. I hope that you, especially you, Mr. Warren, are going to go back to your representatives and let them know that up on the Hill, people aren't only concerned, they're beginning to get angry. And that a lot of the actions that are going to be taken in this committee and in the transportation committee and in the House are going to depend a great deal on the actions that your members take themselves to correct some of the problems that they have.
With that, I'll thank you and let the panel go. We'll call up our second panel, Nancy McFadden, the general counsel to the Department of Transportation.
TESTIMONY OF NANCY E. MCFADDEN, GENERAL COUNSEL, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
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Ms. MCFADDEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I welcome the opportunity to appear before the committee today to address the mounting concerns of airline passengers over their treatment by air carriers. I have submitted a written statement for the record, Mr. Chairman, and ask that it be made a part of the hearing record. I will just make some very brief remarks before you today, if that's okay with you.
First of all, I'd like to commend the Chairman and ranking member Lipinski for calling these hearings, for shining a light on the increasing problems facing airline travelers. We also commend the efforts of the members who have sponsored legislation and who have continually prodded the Department of Transportation, like Representative DeFazio, to exercise its authority where appropriate, to try to aggressively look out for air passengers.
I've had the opportunity to meet with a number of members of the committee over the past weeks, as well as with staff. We appreciate the time. We think we've had productive discussions.
Last week, as you know, Secretary Slater and the Vice President announced our Airline Passenger Fair Treatment proposal. That proposal is outlined in my written statement, and I won't go into detail about it. In essence, it shares the same objectives as the various House bills, identifies the same problems, things like delays, cancellations, diversions, unaccompanied minors, denied boarding and cancellations, ticketing issues, mishandled baggage, frequent flyer award disclosure, and protections against discrimination, particularly with respect to the disabled.
We cover those items, we use some different approaches with respect to some of those elements. But we think that we have a lot of common ground with all of the bills, and we think between us we will be able to make real advances for passengers. As the Secretary has said, we want to work with this committee to put passengers first.
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I wanted to just make a couple of points here. You've had a long day, and as I said, my written testimony goes into some detail about our proposal. But a couple of points I think are important for the committee.
First, and this is really echoing a number of members who made statements about this, we believe strongly that true competition is the best protection that consumers can be offered. We know that maintaining healthy competition in the airline industry is a primary and continuing objective of this committee. It is something the Department has worked hard on, and we will continue to do so.
Secondly, I thought I might just outline briefly for you some facts regarding the numbers and types of complaints that the Department of Transportation receives. Last year, we received approximately 9,600 complaints. We know quite clearly, and as has been observed by a number of members, this is only a fraction of the total number of complaints generated by airline passengers.
For the record, we know that airlines do keep track of the complaints they receive, the numbers, and categorized into different kinds of complaints. They do not share that information with us. That's one part of our proposal we think is an important kind of public disclosure--that we be able to report not only the complaints received directly by the Department of Transportation but the total universe of complaints received, broken down by category and by airline.
Two things I think are noticeable, and you have, I think, two charts that the Department of Transportation has provided. Since the mid-1990s, the number of complaints that we've received has started to rise. And particularly in two areas, the first area, flight problems, where we have seen a 40 percent increase over the last two years.
The second area is in customer service. We've seen a 68 percent increase over the last two years in the area of customer service.
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Now, to handle aviation consumer complaints received by the Department, and to enforce all the Department's aviation non-safety requirements, we have a staff of 16 lawyers, investigators and support staff. As Representative DeFazio has said, and I think a number of other members have said, one of the issues in terms of enforcing whatever proposal comes out of the Congress is, in our view, the issue of resources. We need to make sure, if we make commitments to airline passengers that our Government is going to have a responsibility for enforcement, that we have sufficient resources to do the job adequately and as the American public would expect.
Our proposal is based upon two proposals or models that have been used successfully by the Department and were both promulgated by this committee. The first one, and the one I just wanted to mention, is the model that you used and enacted into law to address inadequate industry-wide arrangements for dealing with the aftermath of major airline air crashes. That was the Family Assistance Act approach.
We think that model has been very successful. We commended the committee at the time for developing that approach. We believe that we saw in the recent performance of Swiss Air and Delta following the tragedy off Nova Scotia last year the value of those kinds of plans, having the airlines think about what their procedures and policies and plans are, putting it together and giving it to the Department of Transportation not only for our review, but so that we can make it public.
That initiative has, we believe, had a salutary effect on performance. We believe that the principles underlining that initiative can be applied to the customer service problem that we are facing.
In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, let me just say that we believe, as I mentioned earlier, that the House bills and the Administration's initiative all identify the same problems and we all share the same goals, to ensure that airline consumers are treated fairly, that they are provided full and accurate information, and that they receive real compensation in the event that the airline does not provide the services promised.
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We stand ready to work with you to achieve those goals. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Ms. McFadden. We appreciate your testimony and your fine words. I think it is obvious that we have great commonality in our goals and our desires. We may disagree a little bit on some of the particulars, but I look forward to your responding to some questions and further information.
I'll recognize Mr. Lampson for some questions.
Mr. LAMPSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do have just a couple.
First of all, are airlines currently required to file complaints they receive with the Department of Transportation?
Ms. MCFADDEN. No, they are not, Congressman.
Mr. LAMPSON. Then let me switch back to my biggest interest of children again. Is the Department of Transportation currently required to keep statistics on consumer complaints against airlines, specifically regarding unaccompanied minors?
Ms. MCFADDEN. We do keep track of the complaints that we receive. Last year, Congressman, we received 87 complaints specifically on the problems arising in the area of unaccompanied minors. So we are able to break them out.
I think one of the things we might want to do--becausethey're not an explicit category of complaints--is break them out separately so that we have public disclosure of those kinds of complaints.
Mr. LAMPSON. Good. Then last, how would the Administration's passenger fair treatment initiative require airlines to make their unaccompanied minor program public?
Ms. MCFADDEN. We would require the airlines to include that on whatever internet or public information they provide. We would also include that on our web site that we maintain with respect to revealing public information about the airlines.
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Mr. LAMPSON. Very good. Thank you very much.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Thank you, Congressman.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you.
Ms. McFadden, recently the Inspector General conducted an investigation on how airlines measure or report delays. I am interested, because it was rather, almost shocking today that the airline industry really seems to have either no recall of how they're tracking their own complaint problems, nor were they able to recite that to us.
So I am thinking that potentially, one of the ways we might be able to get our arms around the size of the problem generally and be able to quantify it to some degree would be to have the Inspector General conduct similar kinds of inquiries as it relates to a number of issues, economic cancellations, for example.
I would be interested to hear what your thoughts would be regarding that notion and whether that's even workable.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Certainly, Mr. Chairman, I think that it is workable, and I have the highest regard for our Inspector General and think he can do just about anything.
So I think it is workable. I think in terms of some issues that actually might be a good approach. But I think one of the things you were trying to achieve and we want to achieve is some kind of systemic changes in the way passengers are treated. I do think we need more information.
For example, on the issue that a number of you, especially the ranking member, discussed--economic cancellations. We know how many flights are canceled, but we really do not know much more than that. So we do think, and my consumer office has long thought, that an investigation of economic cancellations, to either back up what the airlines say repeatedly, or to show where there are problems, would be a very valid thing to do.
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Mr. SWEENEY. And we have adequate staffing to be able to do that, or at least to be able to get that process started, correct?
Ms. MCFADDEN. Well, Mr. Chairman, actually we don't. One of the reasons, and really the only reason we haven't for example, undertaken that investigation is because of the lack of staff.
Mr. SWEENEY. Okay. I hesitate to say we ought to make something bigger or grow it before we know even what we are dealing with. I think that's kind of the realm we are in right now, and that concerns me.
Mr. Lampson asked the question whether DOT tracks complaints and what the numbers were. I believe you said there were 87 complaints regarding unaccompanied minors. Again, trying to establish what the universe is and what we are dealing with, do you know how many unaccompanied minors do the airlines carry every year? Is there any way that is tracked or followed?
Ms. MCFADDEN. Mr. Chairman, I do not have that information. I do not believe that we have that information. I do not think there's any reporting requirement in terms of how many unaccompanied minors are assisted by air carriers. We do, just to clarify, we do track the complaints that we receive. We've got those numbers and we've got those broken down into categories.
What we do not track, because we do not receive the information, is how many complaints the airlines receive.
Mr. SWEENEY. And you have that broken down by category and by airline and—
Ms. MCFADDEN. Exactly.
Mr. SWEENEY. What's the normal procedure on a complaint? How do you follow up? What requirements do you put on the airlines to close files or address issues?
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Ms. MCFADDEN. When we receive complaints, we put them into our system so we have this tracking of numbers and categories, and we publicly disclose those. Our consumer office meets monthly with the major carriers to review trends and patterns that they see, to review particularly egregious complaints that we've been made aware of.
And with respect to those kinds of egregious complaints, they are sent to the airline with a request that the airline respond directly to the passenger and let us know how they resolved that matter.
Mr. SWEENEY. Okay. Let me just ask one more line of questions. I noted in your testimony you said that as a shared goal, the Administration, DOT was interested and recognized that the best way we make airline travel better is to increase competition. And I know you're a counsel, not an economist. But what are some of the initiatives and proposals that you would make to increase competition?
I am particularly confused, because I've been told, I do not know if this is absolutely correct, that the Secretary has at his disposal something in the range of 25 additional slot times that have not been allocated out. I come from an area that your agency has termed a pocket of pain. it is tough for me to go back home and explain to my constituents why they do not have absolute access to service, when the Secretary of Transportation is sitting on potential slots that may be applicable and used in Albany or upstate New York.
So if you could answer very quickly some of the outlines of what your proposals on competition are, and then I have a follow-up question.
Ms. MCFADDEN. With respect to the question about 25 slots that we might not be allocating, I will need to check that and I will get back to you on that, because I am not aware of that. We have made a series of slot exemptions and granted slot authority over the last year and a half, two years, slots that did not exist, particularly for new entrant and lower fare carriers, to try to generate increased competition.
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We of course in our FAA reauthorization proposal have proposed to eliminate the slot rule entirely. We have spent a lot of time looking at the issue of unfair competition against new and low fare carriers, and have promulgated draft guidelines that have been the cause of much attention. We are working to finalize those guidelines. We have also worked very closely with the Justice Department in a number of competition areas, I think, a working relationship that has not really existed in the area of aviation over the past few years.
So I think those would be a couple of things I would highlight for you, and I'll get back to you on the 25 slots.
[The information received follows:]
[Insert here]
Mr. SWEENEY. I look forward to that, thank you very much.
I will now turn and ask the ranking member, Mr. Lipinski.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon. It was this morning we met, wasn't it? It seems like a couple of days ago.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Good afternoon.
Mr. LIPINSKI. In the spirit of Congressman DeFazio, because even though he isn't physically present, his spirit hovers over the chamber, he has an idea of, on the jacket for tickets, printing up the 1-800 number to call the Department of Transportation. So everybody knows where to call, nice, big letters. He doesn't want the airlines to destroy any jackets they have now. When they use all those up, the next printing, he would like them to put this 1-800 on there.
So when you're sitting there and you've been delayed for an hour and a half, you pull out your ticket, just to do something, you see that number, you pick up your air phone and call immediately.
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What is your opinion on doing something like this?
Ms. MCFADDEN. First of all, I think the principle of passengers knowing where to call and being given easy access to be able to register complaints is essential. In our proposal, we say that, in the consumer protection plans that the airlines would be required to file for us, they should identify an individual so people will know who is responsible for handling consumer complaints in the airline. They need to identify that in their plan for us.
I think having a 1-800 number is a good idea. I think that it is entirely appropriate at first measure for that to be the airlines. In terms of the Department, and my staff knows that that was one of my first questions when I got to the Department and talked to the consumer staff was, 'Why don't we have a 1-800 number?' As Representative DeFazio said, the Department is concerned about setting up a system such that people have an expectation that tens of thousands of complaints are going to be individually responded to, when we do not have the resources to do that.
So that is my concern. And I do think the first obligation for responding to customer and consumer complaints should be with the provider of the service. I think Government has a role, and I think we've been sharing some ideas about the appropriate role for the Department. I think we are very open to that.
Mr. LIPINSKI. As long as you would ultimately get the information from the airline it would certainly be all right with me if United put their number on, American put their number on, etc. But if they would then have to transport all that information to you, so you would have one central place to gather all the complaints, it would be fine with me.
I was wondering, can you tell, does the Department of Transportation keep track of on-time departures, and what is an on-time departure, and does the Department keep track of on-time arrivals, and what is an on-time arrival?
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Ms. MCFADDEN. The answer is yes, we keep track of both. In terms of an on-time departure, it is true, and we actually have to credit Representative DeFazio on this, it is true that there have been varying definitions of what does 'departure' mean. We have clarified that in the last 24 hours, in response to an Inspector General report and prodding by some members of this committee.
Departure means when the pilot releases the brake after the aircraft doors are closed. That's what departure is, both of those things have to be done.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Would you repeat that to me again?
Ms. MCFADDEN. Yes. The pilot releases the brake and the doors are closed to the airplane. That is what a departure now means, that will be a standard definition and all airlines will have to abide by that definition.
Mr. LIPINSKI. So if my plane is supposed to leave at 2:00 o'clock, and they do that at 1:59, and then we proceed to sit there at the gate for another 45 minutes, that's an on-time departure?
Ms. MCFADDEN. According to that definition, yes.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Would the gentleman yield?
Mr. LIPINSKI. Certainly.
Mr. OBERSTAR. It doesn't include pushback?
Ms. MCFADDEN. No.
Mr. OBERSTAR. You release the brake, close the doors, but you do not actually, the tug doesn't have to pushback and you do not have to reverse engines and push back?
Ms. MCFADDEN. That's correct.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Ah.
Ms. MCFADDEN. But now, let me make sure that in terms of your second question, arrival, because that is the pertinent or really important information. That is—
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Mr. LIPINSKI. Before you get to that, let me get back to departure. Just between you and me here, I think that's a terrible definition of departure, and I would strongly recommend the Department come up with a new one.
[Laughter.]
Ms. MCFADDEN. I hear your comment, and I see Mr. Oberstar's face. I have some of the individuals from the consumer office, and I do not know if Sam Podberesky wants to give a better explanation than this lawyer could come up with for explaining how that definition came about?
Mr. LIPINSKI. Sam is quickly approaching the table.
Mr. PODBERESKY. My name is Sam Podberesky.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Hello, Sam, how are you.
Mr. PODBERESKY. Very good, thank you.
I do not think I can add very much more. The airlines were using four different definitions for departure times, so there was a little bit of leeway. Closing the door and releasing the parking brake was the one most commonly used by carriers.
That's not to say that we do not know how much time the airplane also sits on the ground. We also require the carriers to give us liftoff time. So we know how much time elapses between the time the airplane departs and the time it actually takes off. We also know how much time elapses between the time the airplane touches down and the time the airplane actually arrives at the gate, and passengers start leaving the airplane.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Do you keep track of departure, liftoff, touching the ground, arriving at the gate, do you keep track of all that, and can consumers get to that, or can we get a report on that?
Mr. PODBERESKY. Consumers can get to that information. But the information that we find most useful to consumers, and the information that consumers appear to us to be most interested in is arrival times, if the carriers are meeting their arrival times. If an airplane leaves 15 or 20 minutes late, but you get to the airport on time, consumers usually are satisfied.
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The complaints we get are not about late departures, the complaints we get are about late arrivals and about sitting on runways.
Mr. LIPINSKI. I can understand that.
Mr. PODBERESKY. We can run computer programs that will give us all that information. Typically what we get is the arrival times. We rank carriers by arrival times, we publish that every month. We require that if you call a carrier and ask information on a specific flight, they tell you the percentage of arrivals they had on time the previous month.
Mr. LIPINSKI. But what is an on-time arrival?
Mr. PODBERESKY. An on-time arrival is an airplane that arrives at the gate, the new definition, which is, the new definition of arrival says, setting the brakes at the gate.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Setting the brakes at the gate.
Ms. MCFADDEN. They're pulled up to the gate, they're not on the runway. They've pulled up to the gate and the brakes are set.
Mr. LIPINSKI. So when I land at O'Hare report, and on that runway that takes me out to the middle of nowhere, and the pilot says, another on-time arrival by United Airlines, and I am 10 or 15 minutes ahead of schedule, and then 20 minutes later, after I taxi across highways and finally get to the gate—
Mr. PODBERESKY. No, that's not an on-time arrival. it is not an arrival until they park at the unloading area and set the brake. I've never personally been on a flight where we sat at the gate with the brakes locked and not started to get off the airplane.
Mr. LIPINSKI. Well, in the event you decide to rewrite the definition of an arrival and a departure after this hearing today, I would appreciate getting the new definition. I am sure every other member would also.
As I say, in regard to the departure, I certainly would recommend we come up with something new on that one, if at all possible.
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I thank you very much for your testimony, and I am going to relinquish whatever time I have remaining, whatever time he wants, to Mr. Oberstar, if that's all right with the Chairman.
Mr. SWEENEY. That's fine. Mr. Oberstar.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Counsel McFadden, it is always a delight to have you with us at these hearings or in other settings. You reflect great credit on the FAA and on the Department.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Thank you, sir.
Mr. OBERSTAR. I just want to make an observation. When in 1984, Congress sunsetted the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Sunset Act of 1984, we strongly indicated that Congress expected that there would be, continue to be in place a program to protect airline consumers. At the time, the Reagan Administration argued that no further legislation was needed by our committee.
Congress ultimately, this committee, the Aviation Subcommittee, full committee and ultimately the Congress, disagreed. One of the main reasons we disagreed is that we wanted legislation to continue the role of the CAB. There was a legal issue that existed at that time, legal question, of whether CAB's existing consumer protection authority would transfer to the Department of Transportation.
It was our concern also that without legislation, the only legally constituted Federal authority would be the Federal Trade Commission, for which I have something just a little above contempt.
We concluded also that FTC's authority would be inadequate because they did not have the same power that the CAB had to ensure that consumers would receive the safe and adequate service characteristic of CAB authority. For that reason, we passed the CAB Sunset Act.
We transferred all of CAB's regulations, all of its authority, to the Department of Transportation. And the committee report, statements on the Floor, legislative history, clearly established we expected DOT to continue that authority and from time to time, update that authority within the broad grant of such power.
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I commend the Department for coming out with the parallel proposal to that of the Chairman and to other bills that have been introduced. I would have felt a whole lot better if the Department had said, we have done these things, we have just initiated within our broad authority, instead of saying, well, this is something we think we should do. You have authority to do that. You should have simply said, this is what we will do.
Now, when will you take such action? Use the existing authority you have? Sort out from that long list of good ideas and say, these are things we have authority to do now, we are going to proceed within the others. I think there are a few of those, increasing penalties, civil penalties, for example. That would require legislation.
But just push on. Six hundred fifteen million passengers will applaud you lustily.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Mr. Oberstar, I think you raise a good point. Let me say a couple of things. First of all, the Department has done some things. In that list of areas, where you referred to the legislative history, denied boarding compensation, the Department did put in place, this is post-CAB sunset, a denied boarding compensation policy that is a regulation that requires the airlines to compensate passengers who are involuntarily bumped.
That is something the Department did. The Department did issue regulations regarding compensating passengers for lost baggage. Both of those compensation levels we proposed be raised in our legislative proposal. We could do that by regulation. Regulation takes oftentimes unfortunately much longer than the legislative process, especially when people like the Chairman of the committee are committed to something.
That's why we put it in our legislative proposal. That does not mean that we could not start to do that by regulation.
I also would not want you to be under the misimpression that because we put forward a legislative proposal that we are not doing some things using our enforcement authority. For example, let me give you just two quick examples.
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One, code share disclosure. As you know, we did issue recently a rule requiring that passengers be told not only if they are going to be flying on a code share carrier, but also be told which carrier is actually operating that code share leg. We think that kind of public disclosure is an important thing, we are glad we finally got that rule done. Again, members of this committee like yourself and Mr. DeFazio prodded the Department, to get that done.
In addition, our consumer office and our enforcement lawyers recently did an investigation because we were told that in fact, even under existing rules, airlines were not telling passengers that they were going to be on a code share carrier. And we recently entered a consent decree with two carriers with respect to that, because we found that a significant percentage of the time, passengers were not being told.
So there are initiatives going on, and I hate to keep getting back to the rub of not having the resources. But that is a significant impediment to the Department's being able to do a lot. We are not, as you know, afraid to exercise our authority like we've done in promulgating competition guidelines and some other things. But I think there has been a limit and we've had to prioritize.
Mr. OBERSTAR. That's exactly my next question. These bills pending in the Congress and the Administration proposal all involve a considerable amount of information gathering, information analysis, data review and analysis, and dissemination. That's going to require additional personnel. Have you calculated how many?
At one time I think the Department had, back in the 1980s, some 200 people doing these consumer protection, consumer involved activities. How many would it take to, have you calculated how many it would take to carry out these responsibilities?
Ms. MCFADDEN. In some ways that depends upon the final proposal. But we do think that we need about 20 more people to really start to have an adequate kind of enforcement and consumer division.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. Twenty is all?
Ms. MCFADDEN. That is about the number that the Administration will be trying to seek in terms of additional resources. That's really calculated more toward our proposal. I think it really does depend upon what kind of ultimate provisions we get. we are happy to do some calculations in terms of what additional resources would be needed, depending upon the framework of the bill.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Okay. We'll review that further. That's something I will be interested in pursuing when and if we get to a markup on this legislation, to assure that we will have sufficient personnel to carry out these duties.
Ms. MCFADDEN. We appreciate that.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Following up on the matter Mr. Lipinski raised, and my colleague Mr. DeFazio, about a hotline, and where it should be published, where the number should be published, NASA Ames has a hotline for flight deck crews and for flight attendants and for mechanics. Those personnel do use that line. In some cases, to very important result.
Where are those hotlines published?
Ms. MCFADDEN. I actually—
Mr. OBERSTAR. I know they're published in crew briefing rooms, I know they're published in places where crew have access. They're published in weather report rooms. They are published other places. We ought to take a look at the precedent that already exists for present hotline, and now we are talking about passengers, maybe right there at the desk when you check in.
I am sure the carriers would like to have that published there. On the other hand, maybe they'd all be nicer.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Mr. Oberstar, we have, and I think Mr. Dingell has in his proposal that various ideas for feedback--we proposed to have complaint forms and information at the gates and at the ticket counters.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. My colleague from Texas, Ms. Johnson, raised the question about safety of a code share carrier. Are safety audits required by DOT of U.S. carriers for their foreign code share partners, or do carriers conduct such safety audits on their own? If so, which ones do, do you know that?
Ms. MCFADDEN. I do know that we do not permit code sharing with a carrier of a country that has an aviation authority which has not been found to meet standards by the FAA. That's the civil aviation authority. In terms of the individual carrier, I do not believe that we have requirements with respect to certification of the individual carrier.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Well, of course it is burdensome to require safety audits of individual carriers. It is also not, for some parts of the world, and my judgment is not sufficient to say that the civil aviation authority of the country of registry of the aircraft approved by U.S. authority is sufficient. I think you need to go beyond that.
Ms. MCFADDEN. I think, sir, that we are looking at that issue.
Mr. OBERSTAR. A question has been raised several times about economic cancellations. Has the Department defined, now we've come to a definition of departure, a definition of arrival, several years ago it was a great consternation about what was a near mid-air. There were all sorts of members that finally got a definition of near mid-air. Now we have a definition of runway incursion. That's clearly defined.
What about economic cancellation?
Ms. MCFADDEN. We do not at the current time have a definition of economic cancellation.
Mr. OBERSTAR. Well, I think that's something that should be the subject of a rather extensive discussion within the Department, something on which you should come to some resolution. it is easy enough to get around it by just saying, we just had a bad fuel cart on board, or we had an inoperative device of some sort. Sometimes those may be major safety systems, and sometimes they may just be reading lights that aren't safety problems at all, or MELs.
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So I think this question, one of the things I hear so frequently from members is, our flight was canceled, and it is happened several times. There were only two or three of us.
Well, I will tell you what I did. When the people in Brainerd, Minnesota, on the western edge of my district, complained repeatedly that they were left stranded at the airport and they could hear the commuter aircraft passing right on overhead, they knew it was not a mechanical and it was not inoperative, the plane just flew right on because there were only two or three of them on the ground and it was not worth it to the carrier to land.
So I had the airport director go back over the previous year and total up the days and the times of day on which those overflights occurred. I collected my data and sent it to the Department of Transportation. The Department then began inquiring with that carrier.
And you know, within 30 days those overflights just stopped.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Funny how that happens.
Mr. OBERSTAR. They landed and found those two or three stranded passengers there, put them on board. And maybe that is sufficient, maybe that is all you need, we are going to inspect, we are going to follow up on you.
Ms. MCFADDEN. The Chairman raised the same issue, as to whether or not we should look into that issue. I think it is one that our office wanted to look into. We have not done anything on that.
Mr. OBERSTAR. You do have a penalty for an economic cancellation, do you not?
Ms. MCFADDEN. Currently?
Mr. OBERSTAR. Yes.
Ms. MCFADDEN. We have the denied boarding compensation, but we do not have a penalty for an economic cancellation, no.
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Mr. OBERSTAR. It applies only to the denied boarding?
Ms. MCFADDEN. Right.
Mr. OBERSTAR. All right. It was roundly suggested last week, I suspect on very good grounds, that bad service usually is linked to situations where there is only one airline at an airport. I just suspect that.
Has DOT conducted studies of fortress hubs on these passenger, not on fare competition, but on passenger service, quality of service indices?
Ms. MCFADDEN. No, we have not, Congressman. But it is something that a couple of members have asked us for that information. I think in terms of the information that we have, we can do some analysis and some cross tabulation, we can get you something on that.
Mr. OBERSTAR. You see, I think this is going to be a very important issue as we proceed further with the pending bills. Because the argument from the Chamber of Commerce, the ATA, from the corporate side, the airline side of this issue is, competition will settle all of those matters. And we would all like to believe that.
But if in fact where a carrier is dominant, has an overwhelming presence and they should enjoy good business at that airport, they ought also to provide super service. We ought to make comparisons. That is just simply not the case.
There is only one airport in the country that is designated by two carriers as their hub.
Ms. MCFADDEN. That is correct.
Mr. OBERSTAR. And others do not necessarily have, really, competition. So take a close look at that.
A further thought is an economic cancellation, would it be subject to a civil penalty on grounds that it is a deceptive practice?
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Ms. MCFADDEN. I think so. I think we could find, if we found a cancellation based solely on economic grounds, I think we could find that was an unfair or deceptive practice, yes.
Mr. OBERSTAR. And one final observation. On the unaccompanied minor issue, which I pursued at some length with Mr. Hirst, if Northwest has 120,000 unaccompanied minors, and they are about half the size of American, less than half the size of United, and similar proportion to Delta, you can assume there are probably well over a million unaccompanied minors traveling annually. That is a sizeable number of children.
The Department does not keep statistics, as I understand it, and when this question earlier was raised of Northwest and of other carriers, that the Government should or the Department should regulate the unaccompanied minor program, carriers all said, well, we will just discontinue it, then, if we have to put up with burdensome regulations. I do not think they are likely to discontinue a service that involves over a million passengers.
I think we ought to think about keeping track of that subject, publishing information about it, and suggesting some standards.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you, Mr. Oberstar.
Ms. McFadden, before we leave, I have a couple of questions that relate to the complaints issue and the consumer affairs issue. How many employees are there at the Department of Transportation?
Ms. MCFADDEN. Total?
Mr. SWEENEY. Total.
Ms. MCFADDEN. There are about 100,000, that includes our air traffic controllers and Coast Guard. In terms of all employees, there are about 100,000.
Mr. SWEENEY. And the consumer affairs office is in DOT, or is it in FAA?
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Ms. MCFADDEN. it is in DOT, the Office of the Secretary.
Mr. SWEENEY. How many employees are in the Office of the Secretary?
Ms. MCFADDEN. I actually do not know the total number of employees in the Office of the Secretary. I will give you, I actually do not know the number, Mr. Chairman. We could get that for you. I must say, the Office of the Secretary is a very, very fractional amount of that 100,000 employees.
[The information received follows:]
The total on-board strength for the Office of the Secretary as of March 1999 is 554, including 15.8 full-time-equivalent (FTE) positions in the Office of Aviation Enforcement and Proceedings, 7 of which are in its aviation consumer protection division.
Mr. SWEENEY. This is why I asked that question. In my past, I was an administrator of a large State agency. As such, it was within my authority as a member of the executive branch of my State, I was able to establish the priorities for my agency, and had, although there were Federal and State rules, I had some real flexibility in doing that.
Today and over the last several days, in the course of this hearing, I think it is pretty obvious that members of the House on both sides of the aisle have grown a great deal more concerned with the notion that the priority of consumer protection as it relates to aviation, has not had as high a placement as it should have within the industry, maybe. Our concern as well is that maybe within DOT, it is not, as well.
I know every time from my State legislature came to me and asked me to take on a new initiative, I always wanted more resources to do it. There are always greater needs than there are resources, and I understand all of that.
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But I would suggest that maybe the Department itself take a look at the priority within which it places consumer rights, consumer protection.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Mr. Chairman, I could not agree with you more. We have done that.
One thing I think is important to understand about this issue, because you asked the exact right question, where it is located. It is appropriately located in the Office of the Secretary. One of the things that we find, however, is when Congress allocates funds to the Department of Transportation, when cuts are made, the Office of the Secretary is actually a place that the Congress looks to cut, and the Administration at times looks to cut there.
So the effect of that is to affect things like the General Counsel's office and the consumer office. So it is not as easy as just shifting between priorities. Because we have caps in terms of numbers within the Office of the Secretary and some other impediments.
So I really do think it is something that, while we need to do some look at reallocation, perhaps, I think it is something we could work together on to make sure it is being addressed.
Mr. SWEENEY. Good. I am glad to hear that. I think we have spent a long time, and I will wrap it up, I do think we have a lot of work to do. I thank you for your testimony, I think you have helped us get a little closer to at least beginning to have a sense of how large our problems are and how we define them. I look forward to talking to you some more and receiving some information from you as we begin to focus on this.
Ms. MCFADDEN. Likewise. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SWEENEY. Thank you.
That concludes the hearing for today. We thank you, and we will stand in recess.
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[Whereupon, at 3:31 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned, to reconvene at the call of the Chair.]