Prepare for Airplane Purgatory - The Atlantic

Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:009:11

One evening in May, passengers boarded United Flight 661 from Newark, New Jersey, to Chicago. As the plane readied for takeoff, a thunderstorm swept in, grounding the plane. The storm, which produced winds upwards of 50 miles an hour, was fast moving and cleared a few hours later. And yet, seven hours after Flight 661 first left the gate, it was still on the tarmac, passengers crammed inside. Around midnight, the flight was canceled.<br>More and more travelers across the United States are coming home from trips with similar stories. That same night in May, passengers flying to Denver, Rochester, and Milwaukee were also stranded on planes in Newark for roughly as long as Flight 661. In the first five months of this year, 342 domestic flights were held on the tarmac for more than three hours, according to federal data. (International tarmac delays are far less common.) At that rate, 2026 could become the year with the highest number of extended tarmac delays since the Department of Transportation began policing them in 2010. Currently, that dubious honor lies with 2025, which saw more than 700 three-hour-plus domestic delays. The most torturous category of flight delay is getting more common.<br>Tarmac delays happen in part because modern airlines depend on keeping planes moving. Although air-traffic control decides each plane’s ultimate time of departure, airlines decide when a given flight boards, and holding passengers on the tarmac, rather than at a gate, frees up valuable real estate for the next arriving flight. It also ensures that a plane is ready to depart the moment a weather window opens. But some tarmac delays seem to be a matter of happenstance. I was recently on a flight that sat on the tarmac at LaGuardia for more than two hours after the airport closed a runway because of what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey called a “two-inch depression” next to it. Plus, so many flights need to depart and land each day that a small stop in operations—because of, say, a passing storm—can create a pileup on the runway that takes hours to rectify. Even before Flight 661 was due to take off, air-traffic control had announced plans to delay flights out of Newark in anticipation of weather problems, then temporarily halted flights that evening because of thunderstorms in the vicinity. A spokesperson for United told me that Flight 661 requested to return to the gate as soon as crews figured out it wouldn’t take off in the foreseeable future, but the process “took longer than expected because of ongoing ground congestion.” Certain airports are also being forced to increase the time between takeoffs—and sometimes stop them altogether—owing to shortages of air-traffic controllers.<br>None of this, though, explains why tarmac delays seem to have gotten so bad, so fast. When asked to comment on the recent delay statistics, Airlines for America, which lobbies for the largest airlines in the U.S., blamed “more frequent and unpredictable severe weather patterns across the country, which can significantly affect airport and air traffic operations.” And climate change really has made weather more volatile. But 2025 had nearly three times the average number of tarmac delays as the decade prior, and the weather is not three times worse.<br>Read: Did climate change ground flights in Phoenix?<br>The aughts, too, were a grim time for air travelers. Extended tarmac delays were through the roof—nearly 900 in 2009 alone—and a number of high-profile incidents made the news, including a JetBlue flight on Valentine’s Day 2007 that stayed on the tarmac for 10 hours. Lawmakers took note, and in April 2010, the Department of Transportation implemented a rule allowing airlines to be fined $27,500 for each passenger who was left sitting on a grounded domestic flight for more than three hours.<br>That rule isn’t perfect. It does little for passengers who are stuck for less than three hours, beyond guaranteeing them water and a working bathroom. Those shorter tarmac delays can still be miserable (so miserable that a minor tarmac delay recently inspired one passenger to attempt to escape a Delta plane out of the front cabin door). Plus, the fines levied by the DOT have rarely lived up to the government’s early threats. Since 2010, most extended tarmac delays that have occurred resulted in no fines. “Even in the cases where there have been enforcement actions in years past, the flight crew could probably pick up the change that was left behind in the plane to pay the fine,” Teresa Murray, a consumer-protection advocate at the advocacy group PIRG, told me. In 2018, the DOT fined Allegiant Air just $225,000 for keeping passengers stranded on 10 different planes at some of the nation’s hottest airports in the middle of summer, without adequate climate control, and in one case without food or water. (Allegiant said in its official response to the fines that triple-digit...