Tarmac

Regarding the story "Little aid for fliers stuck on parked jets," Nov. 12: It wouldn't take much more than to sit the task force members on a plane -- chock-full with passengers, parked on a tarmac with urgent needs and discomfort of various kinds to occupy their minds and bodies -- to arrive at a speedy and thorough understanding of the definition of "lengthy." To let the foxes determine what's best for the hens is at best lugubriously preposterous, counterproductive, fraught with bias, devoid of logic and conspicuously stupid.

The travails of passengers on a flight stranded overnight on an airport tarmac in Rochester, N.Y., and new data on airline delays are giving fresh ammunition to supporters of an airline passenger bill of rights. Two major business travel groups, frustrated by ongoing airline delay problems, have joined the call for federal legislation to address snafus like the nightmare that took place in Rochester last month. The Aug. 8 flight from Houston to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., was diverted to Rochester because of severe weather.

It was clear that the political orientations that the "brat pack" held were altered by just a couple of weeks in the U.S.S.R. Such shallowness reinforces the flighty, uncommitted image of affluent child actors. It is unfortunate that their influence will always outweigh their merit. But since they enjoy kissing airport Tarmac, I suggest they spend a couple of weeks in Rangoon, Jakarta or Calcutta (to see how most of the world lives) and then fly to Moscow. I am sure they will find socialist Tarmac a similar flavor to our American variety.

The public is invited to Tony Aliengena's takeoff from Orange County's John Wayne Airport at 10 a.m. Monday. His single-engine Cessna Centurion will be taxiing onto the runway from Martin Aviation Inc., a plane-servicing company on the airport Tarmac one building south of the main airport terminal.

Making up is hard to do - maybe even harder when you're an airline trying to make nice with 700 enraged passengers who sat in planes on the airport tarmac for seven hours during a snowstorm. Passengers on six JetBlue flights last Saturday who were stranded on the tarmac at Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn., will receive a refund of their tickets and round-trip tickets for future travel, airline spokeswoman Sharon Jones said Wednesday. Passengers on Flight 504 from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which garnered the most media attention - probably because of real-time cellphone and text appeals from passengers (and, it turns out, the pilot )

Re "Aviation Officials Urge More Runways," July 27: LAX does not need any more runways. What it does need is the movement of all cargo activity to Palmdale. That would provide many more slots for passenger service and alleviate traffic by removing noisy, smog-producing 18-wheelers. Also, move all light planes to other nearby airports, such as Hawthorne and Santa Monica. More gates are needed--and can be provided--in the existing terminals by employing methods now in use at Dulles Airport in Washington.

Airline passengers bumped from domestic flights are eligible to receive as much as $1,300 under new federal rules that increase the amount of compensation in such cases and require carriers to refund checked-baggage fees for lost luggage. The Transportation Department rules are the latest to be imposed by federal regulators over the last two years in response to several notorious cases of flight delays, including a 2009 incident in which passengers were stranded for nearly six hours on a plane in Rochester, Minn.

Maybe the most amazing part of a JFK airport story involving turtles on the runway is that the reptiles now have their own Twitter feed, @jfkturtles , with more than 2,800 followers and many witty tweets. To catch up the slowpokes here: About 150 turtles crawled onto the runway at New York City's JFK airport Wednesday morning, delaying flights as crews cleared them from the tarmac. The incident occurred about 6:45 a.m. New York time, an FAA spokesman told Associated Press. This has happened before at JFK. In July 2009, a runway was shut down when about 80 turtles crawled from the bay to the tarmac, a seasonal event linked to their  spawning cycle.

In the news report "U.S. Clears Troops in Italian's Death," Army Gen. George W. Casey said he had no reason to believe that U.S. officials were warned that the Italians were on the airport road. But there was reason to believe it. There was an Italian jet transport sitting on the Baghdad airport's tarmac, having been cleared to land there precisely so that it could fly Giuliana Sgrena out of the country. Surely U.S. forces knew it was there, and why. Surely someone in the U.S. chain of command wondered when and under what circumstances it was planning to depart.