DOT fines JetBlue for chronic delays; FAA failures go unpunished
The Department of Transportation has forced JetBlue to agree to a $2 million fine for chronic flight delays. However, you only actually pay $1 million, not $2 million. The rest won’t even be passed on to customers on the flights that are being fined. In exchange, they promise to give you a $75 travel voucher for future delays of 3 hours or more (you’ll need to buy a new ticket from JetBlue to take advantage of this!).
The DOT’s real victory here is getting JetBlue to agree to defer compensation. Because that’s something the Biden administration has failed to advance over the past four years (and would probably be illegal to mandate as a regulation, given Congressional action). They want EU261 style rules, it’s not happening yet, but this is something.
But what is strange, as Mr. Enilia points out, is that the Department of Transportation is responsible for delays in flights departing from, arriving at, or transiting through New York airspace, where the government’s own air traffic control was unable to deploy adequate staffing, which contributed significantly to the delays. JetBlue is being fined.
The DOT is complaining about “four chronically delayed flights that occurred at least 145 times between June 2022 and November 2023,” not JetBlue’s overall service, which underperforms its competitors. The airline operates approximately 1,000 flights daily. They argue that operating an “unrealistic schedule” is deceptive and therefore illegal, but due to the FAA’s air traffic control failures, it is unrealistic in a significant sense. The government is not imposing fines on itself. And the FAA and DOT have continually promised fixes. The schedule was unrealistic because JetBlue believed what the government told them.
JetBlue is rethinking its business. Airlines are doing this because they can’t make money. They realize that in order to get customers to choose, especially if they want customers to choose at a premium price, they need to improve their reliability. $1 million to $2 million is insignificant in this calculation, and the customer is far ahead of the government in this regard.
Ironically, while airlines lobby the FAA to collect more money as a result of their failures, JetBlue writes checks for their failures even though they share responsibility. being forced to do something. There is currently little movement to address the FAA’s chronic failures in procurement, IT project management, and leadership across the organizational chart.
