The pilot of a JetBlue plane stuck on the tarmac for seven hours full of increasingly angry and frustrated passengers pleaded for assistance from airport officials, telling them he “can’t seem to get any help from our own company.”
“I got a problem here on the airplane, I’m gonna need to have the cops on board,” the pilot said, according to cockpit recordings posted on LiveATC.net. “There’s a cop car sitting in front of me right here right now. I need some air stairs brought over here and the cops brought onboard the airplane.
“Look, you know we can’t seem to get any help from our own company, I apologize for this, but is there any way you can get a tug and a tow bar out here to us and get us towed somewhere to a gate or something,” he said. “I don’t care. Take us anywhere.”
ABC News has learned that the Department of Transportation’s Aviation Consumer Protection division is investigating the delay involving Jet Blue Flight 504, as well as a couple of other flights, that occurred Saturday. The investigation began this morning.
If the government determines any airline violated the tarmac delay rule, that carrier could be fined as much as $27,500 per passenger.
The more than 100 passengers on a JetBlue flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Newark, N.J., were stranded for more than seven hours without food, water or functioning bathrooms when the plane was diverted to Bradley Airport near Hartford, Conn.
The flight took off from Fort Lauderdale around 10 a.m., but was unable to land in Newark Liberty International Airport because the glide slope due to weather conditions.
A passenger told ABC News that after the plane circled Newark Airport, the pilot scared the passengers by telling them that they only had 30 minutes of fuel left but Bradley Airport, where the plane was diverted to, is about an hour away. He then got back on PA system to calm them down, and clarify they did in fact have enough fuel to reach Bradley.
The plane landed at Bradley around 1:30 p.m.
Once on the ground, the plane did not move until 9 p.m.
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