The airline industry is abuzz regarding the upcoming “three-hour rule”, which forces U.S. airlines to allow passengers to deplane after no more than three hours of waiting on the tarmac. Congress passed this law in response to several high-profile incidents in which passengers were stranded for many hours due to bad weather and ATC delays in New York, Minnesota, Austin, and other areas.

In my opinion, this law is a classic example of politicians who are more interested in making their constituents happy than in actually understanding the problem and finding a good solution. At first glance, the three-hour rule might sound like a great idea. After all, who wants to sit on an airplane going nowhere for 12 hours with limited food and overflowing toilets? However, this new law severely limits our ability to operate in bad weather, will ultimately cause more passenger inconvenience, and will lead to a significant increase in flight cancellations.

Multi-hour taxi delays generally occur for one of two reasons: 1) Thunderstorms that prevent traffic from efficiently flowing to and from an airport, and 2) Frozen precipitation that causes lengthly deicing delays, makes the runways extremely slick, and sometimes prevents flights from departing or arriving altogether. Sometimes there’s no easy way to know how long a flight will take to go from the gate to the air.

For example, I once worked flights to and from several cities in the Northeast when a line of strong thunderstorms moved through, blocking many of the available “highways in the sky”. Due to the large number of flights and limited paths, the air traffic controllers were hardly allowing anyone to move, gridlocking much of the region. In several cases, all we could do was to add lots of fuel and send the flights out to get in line to depart. They had to wait in line until the storms moved off some of the departure paths. If a flight burned up too much fuel in line and needed to get more, or needed to return to the gate for “passenger convenience”, ATC put that flight in the back of the line once it came back out, resulting in an even longer delay.

As another example, the FAA has declared it illegal to depart in certain combinations of frozen precipitation, such as ice pellets (sleet), snow, and rain mixed together. WIth any frozen precip falling, the aircraft must be deiced prior to departure, which can take a long time. Once deiced, if one of the forbidden combinations of frozen precip falls on the aircraft, the pilots must 1) wait until that combination stops falling, 2) get deiced AGAIN, and 3) hope that the combination doesn’t reappear and force them to repeat the whole process. This is similar to what happened to jetBlue at JFK during their Valentine’s Day meltdown a few years ago. The flight needs to be ready to get deiced and launch when able, but since no one can know for sure what the weather will bring, sometimes the crew needs to get the plane out there and wait.

By forcing us to return to the gate after three hours for “passenger convenience”, we will lose valuable opportunities to launch flights during the sometimes limited windows that become available. Even more importantly, keeping passengers onboard beyond the three-hour mark can result in a fine of $27,500 per passenger. On our 737s, that would be over $3.7 million for a full flight. Rather than risk a heartstopping fine like that, the airlines will preemptively cancel many flights that could face multi-hour delays. So instead of potentially being stuck on a plane for a few hours before reaching their destination, some passengers will have their flights cancelled and won’t reach their destinations at all until a day or more later.

The law goes into effect in April, during thunderstorm season. I’m curious to see how big the impact will be. For more information, check out the following articles:

Three-Hour Rule Ready to Become Reality

Airlines Threaten to Cancel Flights