News10NBC Investigates: Repeated incidents of passengers waiting on planes due to jet bridge problems at Rochester airport
ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Southwest passengers waited longer to get off the plane in Rochester on Saturday night than the length of the flight itself. A video sent to News10NBC by one of the passengers shows employees attempting to get the jet bridge connected to the plane properly for nearly an hour. The same thing happened twice, earlier this month on two different Spirit Airlines flights.
“We didn’t have any other issues with any other airlines that particular night nor were there any mechanical issues with the jet bridge, it was a contractor of Southwest that had that staffing issue,” says Andy Moore, the Director of the Rochester Airport.
While the airport owns the jet bridges and much of the airport infrastructure, it leases out the equipment to the airlines or the vendors they chose to operate their gates, ticketing counters and luggage handling.
Andy Moore: “The airport doesn’t handle the jet bridges going to the plane or retracting from the airplane, the airport doesn’t even do de-icing or fueling of aircraft, we don’t work at the ticket counters or at the gates for the airlines, those are all airlines staff or contractors for the airlines. “
Jennifer Lewke (News10NBC): “We’ve had a few instances lately of issues where people are sitting on the plane waiting to get off and waiting for the equipment to get to them so, is it the same middle man and is there an issue with that vendor?”
Andy Moore: “I know staffing issues are a problem everywhere and it’s my understanding that it is just much more of a staffing issue than anything else and understanding the proper jet bridge operation and so, we’ve been training with them, we’ve helped with training, the airlines have brought in other individuals who are more experienced in jet bridge operations to train their staff.”
Moore says he’s been in constant contact with the vendor who is tasked with running this equipment and they’re actually bringing in some of their senior leadership to Rochester to retrain some of the employees to try and make sure that these situations don’t keep happening.
The issues have been popping up primarily with flights that come in later in the evenings when staffing is already limited.
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