Continental Express: Incompetent? Liars? Both?

One of this week’s biggest news stories has been the ordeal of 47 passengers forced to remain on a Continental Express jet for 9 hours overnight. No food, no fresh water and no functioning toilet. Of greater importance, there is no valid excuse.

You may already know this story. Diverted to Rochester due to severe thunderstorms, the Continental Express jet sat on the tarmac for 9 hours. Offers by other airlines to assist in moving the passengers to secure gate area in the terminal were turned down by Continental.

This nightmare scenario could only occur if Continental Express management is myopic , incompetent or uncaring in the extreme. It’s obvious to me that their management is over-qualified in at least one of these areas of expertise.

Continental Express lied when they stated that passengers could not be offloaded as there was no security personnel to re-screen the passengers. I recognized this a pure rubbish. Gate areas of terminals are secured. There is no reason to re-screen passengers who do not venture outside of the designated security area. Every airport has signs warning passengers not to leave the secured gate area or they will have to pass through security a second time. Passengers could have been unloaded at the gate and instructed to remain there. For some unfathomable reason, Continental Express declined to do that, even when Delta offered their bus to transport the 47 passengers. Later, the airport manager confirmed that Continental was not telling the truth. Passengers could have been debarked and reboarded without requiring re-screening by TSA.

Under most circumstances, detaining citizens against their will is a crime. Apparently not in the commercial air transport industry. Airlines can put people at risk to their health; deny them the basics of food, water and sanitation and suffer no consequences other than bad publicity. Federal Prisons can’t get away with this, so how does the airline industry avoid the crushing penalties they deserve? Other than typical politics as usual and a general lack of concern by self-absorbed elected officials, there is really no valid reason.

I think we have come to expect stupidity from airlines. We tolerate it far too much. Those 47 passengers could have gotten off that airplane anytime they decided to. Simply agree among themselves to do so, then inform the flight crew that they “have 30 minutes to get the passengers off of this aircraft. If that is not accomplished, the passengers will open the doors, deploy the emergency slides and get off on their own”.

Believe me, this would have motivated the airline to resolve the issue immediately in some manner. If not, open the doors and get off. This will be a lesson that the airline industry will remember. The cost associated with getting the slides recertified will be very high, and ultimately, needless.

There’s only one real problem with this scenario. Some of the passengers will lack the courage to take a stand against the airline. Of course, these are often the passengers who are first in line to cry to reporters about their ordeal… Go figure.

Ultimately, the 47 passengers, including babies, were kept on the plane simply because no one at Continental Express was willing to make a decision or assume the responsibility for these people. It was simply easier to lock them up on the plane.

This is a failure at the top levels of the company, and there is no excuse for its disregard for the people who keep them in business.

You can bet a wad of cash that one of the corrective actions to be instituted by Continental will be to “retrain personnel.” You can also bet that no one will be retrained. This is a commonly used ploy in many industries for the purpose of creating a false sense that the same error will not happen again. The only way that it won’t happen again is to lop off the head or heads of those who decided to imprison these passengers, rather than offload them. If someone of consequence is not immediately fired, you’ll know that Continental is merely trying to build a smokescreen. You know, ignore the problem and maybe it will go away.

My advice…. Fly some other airline until Continental comes completely clean and makes a serious effort to change their middle management’s mentality.