Sun Country, the leisure-oriented carrier that had another runway stranding at New York Kennedy Airport over the weekend, says it won't do it anymore. Waits will be limited to four hours, and the boss says he supports passenger-rights legislation pending in the Senate. Read a trade newspaper story here.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood just announced that the Continental Express crew has been cleared of blame in the Aug. 8 stranding of 47 passengers on one of its planes at the Rochester, Minn., airport. DOT investigated what happened after members of Congress, and lots of others, asked why these things continue to happen. The passengers were trapped on the 50-seat regional jet from just after midnight until 6 a.m, creating the usual scene of an overloaded toilet, crying babies and only pretzels to eat. 

LaHood said in a statement that the local representative of another regional carrier, Mesaba Airlines, a Northwest Airlines, now Delta Air Lines, subsidiary, "improperly refused the requests of the captain to let her passengers off the plane." LaHood said Mesaba was the only airline with personnel at the airport able to assist Continental at the airport,. A DOT spokesman added that why Mesaba had that role at the airport is part of the investigation.  

The Continental crew was told by Mesaba that the airport was closed to passengers, apparently there was no one from the Transportation Security Administration available to screen passengers. In fact, the passengers were not going to need to be rescreened by TSA personnel. DOT did fault senior Continental and Express Jet officials for not getting more involved in resolving the situation.

"There was a complete lack of common sense here," LaHood said. "No wonder the flying public is so angry and frustrated."

Once again, we're left to wonder why the entire airline industry, not just some carriers, can't seem to respond better to these situations by kicking responsibility up the corporate ladder until they can be resolved. The Express Jet unit that flew the plane received most of the criticism in this case, and it now looks like others -- both in and out of Continental -- deserve some as well.

UPDATE: This should  have been included in the original posting: The CEOs of both Continental and Mesaba parent Delta issued statements saying they were investigating what happened. Delta CEO Richard Anderson said he had reached out to Larry Kellner at Continental and promised cooperatiion in probing the incident.

Trust me, some time soon I surely will be tweeting myself, but for now I'm still an interested observer of Twitter, the amazingly popular social media tool. An article we found looks at how airlines have had to embrace Twitter as a tool to respond to cusomers and to broadcast fare sales and the such. But Twitter also opens up airlines, or any business, to attacks in 140-word snippets that are hard to effectively deal with. Read more here.

The Air Transport Associattion has made a major announcement concerning the use of alternative fuels, a topic I wrote about back in January when Continental tested a biofuel mixture in one of its 737 jets. This time, the trade group said eight airlnes would be testing the use of a biodiesel fuel in their ground equipment at LAX, starting in about three years. I found few articles about this, but here's one. 

Is it just me, or do we seem to be moving very, very slowly on development of new fuel technology in aviation? Yes, it's a tough problem to produce oil from plants in volumes that make it economically feasible as an alternative to fossil fuel. The infrastruture hasn't been built yet. But shouldn't we be attacking global climate change, and the role airlines play in it, with the urgency once devoted to putting a man on the moon?

Tell me what you think, and I'll write about it again this fall.

Rick Seaney, the head of www.farecompare.com and a frequent commenter on airline fares and service in Winging It and elsewhere, had a fun posting on the daily e-mail I get from him of travel news. Seems one of his employees was flying US Airways from Hartford/Springfield and was warned by an customer-service agent that bags do get lost on airlines and not to put anything of great value in a checked bag.

We immediately thought of the time, a few years ago, when US Airways people in out stations regularly warned customers about checking bags that had to go through PHL. Remember how dreadful things were, with PHL's bag-handling problems dragging down the whole airline? Seaney tells me that in this case, his employee was flying through Charlotte, which also had its share of baggage woes, which have largely disappeared since then.

I doubt the US Airways agent was saying something specific about the airline's hub airports. But it's nice to know that there are airline folks out there dealing honestly and directly with customers.   

I have been trolling the myriad available travel news sources we usually use for some detail on the Transportation Security Administration's new Secure Flight program. Starting this week, TSA took over from the airlines responsibility for making sure you are who your boarding pass says you are. Among new procedures when you buy a ticket, you are now required to give your birthday and gender, and make sure your name is the same as it is on your government-issued ID. I found the article I've been looking for, the New York Times' Practical Traveler column from Sunday. Find it here.