Passengers Sue Northwest Air After Snowstorm-Related Delays

DETROIT - Happy New Year, Northwest Airlines - 1999 has brought a barrage of complaints and a lawsuit over delays during last weekend's huge snowstorm.

The nation's fourth-largest carrier, coming off a 1998 that included a costly 15-day pilots strike, was sued yesterday by two travelers frustrated by Northwest's performance at Detroit Metropolitan Airport during and after the storm.

Attorney Larry Charfoos yesterday filed the lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court on behalf of Timothy and Susan Koczara of Grosse Pointe, Mich., who said they were on a plane detained for eight hours. The airline at one point this week said more than 1,100 flights systemwide were canceled because of the weather.

Charfoos said he plans to seek class-action status for the lawsuit, allowing other disgruntled passengers to join. Although the county and the airport are named as co-defendants, he contends Northwest was primarily at fault.

"Northwest has hit a new low . . . keeping people prisoner in their little containers," Charfoos said. "No passengers have ever been locked into airplanes for that long unless there was a hostage taking."

Northwest insists it did the best it could, and blamed some of the woes on the airport, its snow removal contractor and the city of Detroit, whose policy of not plowing residential streets may have prevented some Northwest employees from getting to work. About half of the airline's workers didn't show up Sunday, when Northwest resumed incoming flights.

"If you look at any employer over the weekend, they had the same problems," Northwest spokesman Jon Austin said. "This was a blizzard-of-the-decade kind of event."

Still, the complaints were not what Northwest had hoped for to open the new year.

From April through September of last year, the Eagan, Minn.-based airline was rated the least likely major carrier to arrive on time, according to the government's Air Travel Consumer Report. It improved to No. 3 in October.

Northwest also regularly placed near the bottom in handling baggage and consumer complaints.

Company officials blamed the poor showing on bad weather and labor slowdowns, including the pilots' strike last summer, which produced a third-quarter loss of $223.8 million.