The folks at the Flight Wisdom blog sent us a note, pointing out their post on jetBlue’s revision of the contract of carriage (pdf) to incorporate the previously promised “bill of rights.” (The last three pages of the contract contain the “bill of rights” provisions.)
Hats off to jetBlue for making good codifying their promises of vouchers for delays into the legal document that governs all tickets. That’s a good step.
But…
There’s still the matter of the “controllable irregularity.” As you may recall from my previous critique of the jetBlue apologies, the airline built in a huge loophole with the term “controllable irregularity.” If problems could be blamed — even in part — on anything uncontrollable, such as the weather, they wouldn’t owe you ANYTHING. That has now been codified:
Controllable Irregularity as used in Section 36, means a delay, cancellation or diversion that is not caused by a Force Majeure Event. For the sake of clarity, if in a chain of multiple events, the original irregularity is due to a Force Majeure Event, the cause of the subsequent event(s) reasonably related to the original irregularity shall be deemed an Uncontrollable Irregularity.
So by my reading of this, the passengers who were stuck on the taxiways at JFK for hours last month would have been eligible to receive… NOTHING. (corrected below) The weather started the problems, after all. Subsequent human decisions to keep the aircraft waiting and waiting would not have been necessary, had the weather been fine, so we can trace the “original irregularity” back to the weather.
So I’m back to being underwhelmed. Expect the media to celebrate this new jetBlue contract as a glorious event in the history of corporate apologia. But in reality, your rights haven’t improved much.
(Update/Correction: Re-reading the contract, I stand corrected. I read the first part without reading the second part carefully enough. I see that the controllable/uncontrollable distinction is overruled by the time spent on the taxiway, so yes, the February stranded passengers would have gotten vouchers for their trouble. The controlled/uncontrolled distinction really comes into play when passengers are delayed but the plane hasn’t left the gate. Once the decision to leave the gate is taken, then the “ground delay” rules kick in. Sorry for the mixup. Mea culpa. As Cranky says below, I’ve now gone from underwhelmed, to just plain “whelmed.”)
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March 7th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
My follow up: What would the ruling be if the original problem was not a Force Majeure event, but a subsequent problem was? Take UA907 (http://blogs.usatoday.com/sky/2007/03/flight_907.html). The original problem was a plane change. But the time it took for the plane change caused the flight to be delayed by weather, which led to the nine-hour delay. So would this be considered conrollable (since the original delay was caused by UA) or uncontrollable (since the major portion of the delay was caused by the weather)?
March 7th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
I think you can move back from being underwhelmed to just being, uh, whelmed. If you look at all the sections on ground delays, they apply regardless of cause. So all those people stuck on taxiways would be compensated.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:35 am
[...] jetBlue’s policy revision had its problems, and didn’t go far enough in my opinion, it’s miles ahead of United’s policy, [...]