BrianGarst.com

So most all of us have heard about the JetBlue bruhaha that occurred the other day where an airplane full of passengers was stranded on the runway for however long it was. Boohoo, fly with someone else and move on, right? Well, that’s not good enough for the government, they need an investigation!

At the request of the Transportation Department’s top official, the agency’s inspector general on Tuesday said he will investigate policies at JetBlue and American Airlines that led passengers to be stranded aboard planes for several hours this winter during storms.

“I have serious concerns about airlines’ contingency planning that allows passengers to sit on the tarmac for hours on end,” Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said in a statement. “It is imperative that airlines do everything possible to ensure that situations like these do not occur again.”

Peters asked Calvin Scovel, the Department of Transportation’s inspector general, to examine why JetBlue passengers were stranded aboard a plane at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport during the recent Valentine’s Day storm, which caused the airline to cancel about 1,000 flights and sparked a massive corporate mea culpa campaign.

. . .Scovel said in a statement that his invesigation would provide “a thorough and objective assessment so that corrective actions can be taken by the appropriate parties to prevent such situations from happening again.”

Maybe I’m just a simple minded neandercon who hasn’t yet figured out that government is the answer to anything and everything, but I don’t see why it’s the responsibility of the federal government to waste time investigating bad business decisions. If people don’t want to be stranded for hours on end without recourse, they’ll fly with someone else who proves themselves capable of avoiding such problems. If they don’t mind, they’ll continue to fly with JetBlue. Ah, the wonders of competition.

We don’t need to spend taxpayer dollars to give JetBlue a “thorough and objective assessment” that they are perfectly capable of divining on their own when they see their next quarter earnings. Besides, if government wants to understand where the problem comes from, they should perhaps look at their own regulatory tendencies first:

Last week, the Air Transport Association, which represents most major passenger and cargo carriers, said the Federal Aviation Administration should allow delayed flights to come back to terminals so passengers can exit planes without forcing those planes to lose their place in line for takeoff.

What a novel idea.