Let Passengers Fight Back

You may have seen this story in the last few weeks. A Continental Express jet from Houston to Minneapolis-St. Paul was diverted to Rochester, MN because of bad weather at MSP. Things went downhill from there when the airline kept the passengers on the commuter jet for six hours without restrooms (toilet full), food, and all to the the lovely scent of dirty diapers! Amazing. And this is not the first time that the airlines have done this.

Some are calling for a new Federal regulation to set out how long the cattle - er, passengers - can be held captive on a plane. townhall.com/columnists/DebraJSaunders/2009/08/16/the_flight_2816_fiasco I think a better approach would be to let the passengers fight back by enacting a new Federal statute that would create a special class for class action lawsuit purposes of all the people on a commercial flight held on board for longer than say 2 hours. This way they would only need to hire one lawyer and try the case once, preventing the airline from using the "divide-and-conquer" approach that wears down individuals through attrition. The statute should provide for minimum damages of $10,000 per passenger (a nice round number) plus attorney fees to a prevailing plaintiff class. I would love to see what a jury thinks about this kind of treatment by an airline. I bet that airlines would quickly pay much more attention to stranded passengers than they did to the poor folks in the Continental Express debacle. And no expansion of the Federal bureaucracy. A win for passengers and for the general tax-paying public! Think about it.