Etihad Will Review Tarmac Delay Policy After Insane Delays

Are the Conditions of Carriage the reason why it's legal to get bumped? (involuntarily)

"It’s time for airlines to either self-police with published policies, or absent of that, for more governments to step in and create rules for the airlines"

Isn't that EXACTLY what happened here in the United States? The airlines CONTINUALLY failed to address the problem until finally (after a lot of pax advocate group lobbying) the gov't stepped in with the rules we have in the U.S.

Before the rules (and threat of HUGE fines) there were plenty of similar "trapped in an airplane" stories in the U.S. too....

Atif has a good point. I still remember the Dec 2010 blizzard at JFK and prior to that, the tarmac 4-hour rule only applied to domestic carriers, hence why you heard stories of CX, TK, BA, EK flights all on the JFK tarmac for hours after arrival in JFK.
Afterwards, however, the DOT revised the rule to include foreign carriers operating on US airports.

I keep getting Phishing attack alerts from my browser and virus alert when on your page. Came up on this one, the Dusseldorf Etihad page and also on other pages of yours. Others websites seem to be fine.

similar to danielle, also having an issue. it's impossible to view this site on safari mobile -- it keeps automatically redirecting me to app downloads. works fine in chrome.

Hey Lucky,

have you read that Etihad is actually being sued for this? Apparently one of the passengers aboard the flight to Dusseldorf was a local judge. While getting more and more frustrated on the plane he constructed a case against Etihad and passed it around to his fellow passengers to join. Once back in Germany he and about 100 other passengers sued Etihad at a Berlin court (as the German office of Etihad is located there). They sued for imprisonment and something else. Will be interesting what the results will be...
Kind regards from Germany!

@ Abdel Rahim Abdallah -- Yes, the contract of carriage does give them the liberty to bump passengers as needed.

I completely agree with you. When I tried to understand the delay compensation in the US, apparently, US doesn't have something like EU261/2004, so it is up to the contract of carriage. So I explored a bit but then realized those contracts basically means nothing. The only thing you can rely on is how good the customer service is...

From what I've read, the U.S. tarmac law is three hours, after which the airline is subject to an FAA fine of $27,500 per passenger per additional hour. That's just about the best protection in the world. Apparently there's no tarmac rule at Canadian airports yet...and Middle Eastern airports? Give me a break. I've lived in the Emirates before for 9 years in both Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Don't be fooled by the tons and tons of money those rulers throw at CNN and BBC to make you think they're modern world cities just because they have tall buildings and a metro train. The slavery mentality still predominates.