Another Minnesota-bound plane sits six hours on tarmac

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Nearly two weeks after a Continental Airlines flight left 47 people stranded on a Rochester tarmac for six hours, a plane filled with Minnesotans spent the same amount of time awaiting takeoff in New York on Friday. The Sun Country flight opened boarding for its 100 passengers an hour late and took off six hours after that, due to construction and weather delays.

Sun Country says it’ll issue refunds to passengers, who were eventually offered the opportunity to buy food as they waited for takeoff (although one passenger tells USA Today supplies were gone by the time the food cart made its way to him). The airline announced yesterday it would voluntarily implement a four-hour limit on how long passengers can be confined to an on-the-ground plane.

The delay follows an Aug. 8 incident in which a Continental flight, run by ExpressJet and bound from Houston to Minneapols-St. Paul, was grounded in Rochester at midnight, stranding 47 passengers on the tarmac for six hours without food or the ability to de-plane. The U.S. Department of Transportation found that a representative for Mesaba Airlines, the only carrier staffing the airport at that time, “improperly refused the requests of the ExpressJet captain to let her passengers off the plane, telling the captain that the airport was closed to passengers for security reasons.”

(Via The Consumerist.)