8A -The Michigan Daily - Thursday, March 13, 1997 NATION/WORLD Passengers give airlines bumpy reviews L os Angeles 'fmnic Last year, as you may have heard, was a good year for the United States' passenger airlines. Industry figures show they filled 69.8 percent of their seats, up from 67.3 percent in the very profitable year before. They boosted the number of miles flown by paying pas- sengers by 6.7 percent (to 548.9 bil- lion). And they made billions in profits. But by several other measures, 1996 was a bad year indeed for those same airlines, and some would say worse for the consumers they carried. A recent release of statistics from the U.S. I ransportation Department shows that tardy arrivals and cancellations increased from the year before. Also, crews mishandled more pieces of bag- gage. More passengers were involun- tarily bumped from flights. And, not surprisingly in light of all that, passen- ger complaints to federal officials leaped by nearly 18 percent. In other words, by every measure federal officials use to assess airline passenger service, 1996 was a letdown. Or, to express the equation in yet anoth- er way: quantity up, quality down. Here are some figures and rankings, all based on domestic flights by the 10 largest U.S. carriers, On-time arrivals: An on-time flight, by industry definition, is one that arrives within 15 minutes of its sched- uled time. These numbers include weather-related delays and since January 1995 also have included delays attributed to mechanical reasons. The 10 largest U.S. carriers together were on time with 74.5 percent of flights in 1996, down from 78.6 percent the pre- vious year. Southwest Airlines posted an on-time mark of 81.8 percent, fol- lowed by Continental and Northwest, at 76.5 percent. The most habitually late major carrier: Trans World Airlines with a 68.5-percent on-time rate. ® Mishandled baggage: Drawn from reports filed by passengers when their luggage fails to turn up on the right airport carousel at the right time, these figures show that your odds of having a bag mishandled by a major U.S. carrier last year were 5.30 in 1,000. (In 1995 the number was 5.18). , Overbooking: When airlines sell more tickets than they have seats, thev even the numbers out by "bumping"' passengers, sometimes on a volunteer basis, sometimes involuntarily. In the government tally of involuntary bumps over the first nine months of 1996 (numbers are not yet in on the last three months), the most unreliable major car- rier was Southwest. In nine months, Southwest crews bumped 9,455 passen- gers, or 2.30 for every 10,000 to board. That rate was more than twice the 1996 average of 1.06 bumps per 10,000, and far exceeded leading performers Continental (0.18 per 10,000) and Northwest and American (both 0.54 per 10,000). The majors' 1995 rate of invol- untary bumps was 1.03 per 10,000. U Complaints: The most common causes of passenger complaints overall were flight delays, cancellations and missed connections, followed by bag- gage troubles and customer service issues. Altogether. major carriers got 7,105 service complaints last year (0.74 per 100,000 passengers), up from 1995's total of 6,025. Southwest prompted the fewest complaints, a remarkably low 117 among 56.5 mil- lion passengers for a rate of 0.21 complaints per 10,000 passengers. Runners-up were Alaska (0.51 per 10,000) and Continental (0.58 per 10,000). The most common target of complaints: TWA, at 1.25 per 100,000. *1 10% sodium nitrite T /% you don't want to know Cloning debate continues WASHINGTON (AP) - Th Scottish scientist who cloned an adult sheep told Congress yesterday "it would be quite inhumane" to try the technology on people. A senator told him and a rapt hearing audience that human cloning is sure to come "and I don't fear it at all. It is wrong and "demeaning to human nature" for government to try to stop or limit human cloning experi- ments, said Sen. Tom Harkin, (Dl- Iowa). "Human cloning will take place and it will take place within my lifetime," he said. "I think it is right and proper... It holds untold benefits for humankind in the future." Harkin, who lost two sisters to can- cer, has been one of the strongest sup- porters on Capitol Hill of medical research. The senator was instrumental in starting a new Office of Aternativ Medicine at the National Institutes ei Health and is co-author of a plan to increase NIH funding this year by $5 billion. Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, said that since the world learned he and colleagues had cloned an adult sheep named Dolly, there has been an explosion of specula- tion about cloning of humans. But Wilmut said human cloning is not practical, possible or ethical* "Similar experiments with humans would be totally unacceptable," he said. "I don't see any reason why we would want to copy a person," said the scientist. "I personally have still not heard of a potential use of this tech- nique to produce a new person-that I would find ethical or acceptable." It took 277 attempts to produce Dolly, said Wilmut, and some of th4 failures resulted in defective lambs that died quickly after birth. "It would be quite inhumane to con- template using these techniques at this stage, he said. Though he agreed with Harkin that "it is not possible nor even desirable to attempt to regulate the way that scienec progresses," Wilmut said legislators should address "the question of the individuals who will be involved, th* children who would be involved." Harkin, in a short. speech that dropped the entire Senate hearing room into attentive silence, said governments should not try to slow the march of sci- ence, even for a technology as ethically troubling as human cloning. He said it was wrong for President Clinton to issue an order to stop all fed- erally funded human embryo research and for Sen. Christopher Bond, (R* Mo.), to propose legislation to make the research ban permanent. He compared these government efforts to the 17th century punishment of the astronomer Galileo, who advanced Copernicus' theory that the Earth orbits the sun, instead of the other way around. 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