WASHINGTON — The pilot of an airliner stranded overnight on an airport tarmac in Minnesota pleaded for her 47 passengers to be allowed to get off and go inside a terminal. “We just need to work out some way to get them off. . . . We can’t keep them here any longer,” she said.
The Transportation Department on Friday released recordings of the appeals by the pilot and her airline’s dispatchers while passengers were kept waiting for nearly seven hours in the cramped plane.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said a preliminary investigation found that ExpressJet, a regional carrier for Continental Airlines, wasn’t at fault.
Instead, blame for the incident belongs with Mesaba Airlines, whose representative incorrectly told ExpressJet that passengers couldn’t go into the terminal because Transportation Security Administration personnel had left, LaHood said.
Security regulations allow for deplaning passengers to be kept in a separate “sterile” area until they are ready to board.
Mesaba was the only airline with staff still at the Rochester airport the night of Aug. 7-8.
The plane left Houston at 9:23 p.m. Aug. 7, was diverted by thunderstorms to Rochester, and passengers spent the night on the plane. In the morning, they were allowed to deplane for a couple of hours before reboarding the same plane. They arrived in Minneapolis, their destination, at 9:15 a.m.
The recordings show the captain talking to an ExpressJet dispatcher, and dispatchers trying to persuade Mesaba officials to allow passengers inside.
“I can’t get her a bus; I can’t do anything,” said a Mesaba representative.
“You can’t do anything for her? OK,” said the ExpressJet dispatcher.
At 4:44 a.m., after the terminal had reopened, a Mesaba manager said the passengers couldn’t deplane because there was no jetbridge available and it was raining.
At 5 a.m., the flight got clearance to take off again. But its crew had worked more than the legal limit of hours, and another crew had to be flown in.
