Starting on December 18 and throughout the week to the 23rd and beyond, to the 27th, we had full irregular operations and emergency operations plans stood up throughout.
On the specific issue of delays on the tarmac, of course our number one priority was to be able to work with the airlines, with ground crews, to get those passengers safely off as soon as possible. As I mentioned earlier, that effort requires coordination and the capability to tow aircraft. The airport authority does not have that authority, that capability or that responsibility; that is the responsibility of the airlines, so we rely on airlines, through their contracted ground handling crew, to move aircraft off gates. Normally, of course, that works very well. They come on to a gate and they move off. In this case, we came to a ground stop and we had no gating capability, as was noted.
You might wonder, though, why we didn't use air stairs. I've been asked several times why we didn't have buses and air stairs available. We certainly stood up buses and air stair capabilities immediately. However, it was the opinion of our airside safety officer that due to the congested conditions on the airfield and the snow, it was unsafe to have passengers depart. We evaluated that situation on an hourly basis until the conditions improved such that we could safely deplane people using air stairs, and then we proceeded to do that, thus clearing up the congestion.
I totally agree that delays for that amount of time are unacceptable, which is why we've put the changes in place that will require that aircraft be on the gate for only a limited time and that airlines demonstrate to us that they have the towing capacity to remove those aircraft.
