Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

When Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., chairman of the House Transportation Committee, commented on the recent debacle with customers stranded on airplanes, he said concerning JetBlue (JBLU) that "The airline can't say, 'We didn't know, we didn't anticipate, this didn't happen before.'"

He's referring to the recent incident on December 30, when American Airlines and American Eagle left around 5,000 passengers sitting on planes for eight hours.

There was also a similar problem in the late 1990s when Congress tried to put legal protections in place for passengers after a number of similar cancellations and delays. While that failed, the airlines did agree to an Airline Customer Service Commitment, which is in all customer agreements and are legally enforceable.

After all of that, you'd think that the industry would have measures in place for these types of situations that are by no means rare.

Any business that has potential for something that could happen beyond their control should have emergency plans in place that serve and protect their customers. I know that sounds obvious, but then how come an entire industry doesn't see it?

In the retail sector, when power may go out or dangerous weather comes, many stores have plans in place to protect the customers and the store. They vary according to businesses, but they are ready to take action when the need arises.

As JetBlue CEO and founder David Neeleman said concerning stranded passengers on their planes, "We should have called them sooner," referring to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to bring vehicles to take passengers back to the terminal. He added that "We should have done better. There was an opportunity to do better." 

The failure came about more from simply ignoring putting plans into place that could alleviate this and empower his pilots to make decisions in these circumstances. If there was a plan in place this simply wouldn't have happened in the way it did.

Neelman is right, they should have done better. But in this case it was ultimately his failure not to have these contingency plans in place when the industry had seen these things happening for a long period of time.