And delays are being marked as “excessive” at O’Hare already today. As of 10.30 Central time, about 100 arrivals and departures had been canceled at O’Hare — nearly all of them by American Eagle or American Airlines, according to Flightstats.com

And in Minneapolis, they’re still expecting that winter storm, including heavy snow.

So as always, check ahead before going to the airport. There is no slack in the system. None.

###

So git, I say.

But sorry, Midwest, here it comes, over the mountains and up the prairies, where it appears likely to develop into a nasty winter storm tomorrow just in time for one of the biggest Christmas air-travel days. It may be mostly freezing rain and ice, but here’s also going to be a lot of wind, which always adds to flight disruptions.

Alas, one of the potential results is that a larger-than-normal number of flights could be preemptively canceled by airlines worried about the draconian new DOT rules on tarmac delays. The Air Transport Association has said that one of the unintended consequences of that action, which was taken to address problems the airlines and the FAA failed to address adequately, will be more flight cancellations.

So we’ll see. If O’Hare or other Midwest airports are in your travel plans tomorrow or Thursday, remember that this week began with more than 3,000 flight cancellations during the East Coast blizzard. The air-travel system, which has no slack built in even in normal times, still hasn’t fully digested that lump of displaced passengers and dislocated aircraft and crews. It is not yet fully functional from that disruption.

So plan for delays but most importantly, be prepared for a flight cancellation.

###

The Transportation Department unilaterally imposed rules that would require airlines with airplanes stuck on a tarmac for more than three hours to give passengers the option of getting off the plane.

The action addresses a situation that began festering in late 2006, when thousands of passengers sat stranded, amid deteriorating cabin ventilation and sanitary conditions, and without food, for eight hours or more on hundreds of planes idled on tarmacs by bad weather in and around Texas. Following that came literally years of similar strandings.

Kate Hanni, a San Francisco-area real estate agent, was with her husband and sons on one of those stranded planes in late 2006. Following that event, and entirely on her own, she organized a grassroots movement to push Congress to pass a so-called Passengers Bill of Rights. A key provision of that push was the three-hour rule. Airlines and their amen-chorus in the media first ridiculed the movement, and then as it gained momentum sought to block it at every turn.

The bill — still pending in Congress as part of the long-delayed legislation to re-authorize FAA funding — also would require airlines to ensure adequate health and safety provisions on stranded flights, among them working toilets.

Others have sought to ridicule and then co-opt Hanni’s movement and push her out of the picture as reforms loomed. I have known Kate Hanni since she first quit her job and rented a cheap hotel room in Washington in the cold winter of 2007 to begin her long push for passengers’ rights. Today’s reforms by the Transportation Department would not have happened without Hanni’s efforts. The Airline Passengers Bill of Rights, by the way, still is part of the pending FAA reauthorization bill, which Congress is expected to take up again early next year.

So Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who is known to have been incensed by airlines’ failure to firmly address the problem on their own, has lowered the boom even before Congress might act. Here’s the Transportation Department statement today:

***

“WASHINGTON — U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today announced a new rule that significantly strengthens protections afforded to consumers by, among other things, establishing a hard time-limit after which U.S. airlines must allow passengers to deplane from domestic flights.

“Airline passengers have rights, and these new rules will require airlines to live up to their obligation to treat their customers fairly,” Secretary LaHood said.

The new rule prohibits U.S. airlines operating domestic flights from permitting an aircraft to remain on the tarmac for more than three hours without deplaning passengers, with exceptions allowed only for safety or security or if air traffic control advises the pilot in command that returning to the terminal would disrupt airport operations. U.S. carriers operating international flights departing from or arriving in the United States must specify, in advance, their own time limits for deplaning passengers, with the same exceptions applicable.

Carriers are required to provide adequate food and potable drinking water for passengers within two hours of the aircraft being delayed on the tarmac and to maintain operable lavatories and, if necessary, provide medical attention.

This rule was adopted in response to a series of incidents in which passengers were stranded on the ground aboard aircraft for lengthy periods and also in response to the high incidence of flight delays and other consumer problems. In one of the most recent tarmac delay incidents, the Department fined Continental Airlines, ExpressJet Airlines and Mesaba Airlines a total of $175,000 for their roles in a nearly six-hour ground delay at Rochester, MN.

The rule also:

–Prohibits airlines from scheduling chronically delayed flights, subjecting those who do to DOT enforcement action for unfair and deceptive practices;

–Requires airlines to designate an airline employee to monitor the effects of flight delays and cancellations, respond in a timely and substantive fashion to consumer complaints and provide information to consumers on where to file complaints;

–Requires airlines to display on their website flight delay information for each domestic flight they operate;

–Requires airlines to adopt customer service plans and audit their own compliance with their plans; and

–Prohibits airlines from retroactively applying material changes to their contracts of carriage that could have a negative impact on consumers who already have purchased tickets.

Today’s final rule was adopted following a review of public comments on a proposal issued in November 2008. The Department also plans to begin another rulemaking designed to further strengthen protections for air travelers. Among the areas under consideration are: a requirement that airlines submit to the Department for review and approval their contingency plans for lengthy tarmac delays; reporting of additional tarmac delay data; disclosure of baggage fees; and strengthening requirements that airline ads disclose the full fare consumers must pay for tickets.

The rule goes into effect 120 days after date of publication in the Federal Register. The rule may be obtained on the Internet at www.regulations.gov, docket DOT-OST-2007-0022.”

***

The airlines’ main trade group, the Air Transport Association, issued a statement saying that it believes the new rule “will lead to unintended consequences – more canceled flights and greater passenger inconvenience. In particular, the requirement of having planes return to the gates within a three-hour window or face significant fines is inconsistent with our goal of completing as many flights as possible.”

###

PHOTO: What are you smiling about, pal?

Flights were scrubbed from the boards in huge numbers at airports in the Mid-Atlantic states as a severe snowstorm moved up the East Coast.

By all current indications, air travel in the Northeast could be impacted for days, and the ripple effect will be felt on connections throughout the country. Airlines will be scrambling to get idled or displaced airplanes and crews rescheduled and repositioned — and to re-accommodate passengers in a system that, even under normal conditions, has no slack built in.

So forget what I said the other day about there being no Christmas travel crunch. With tangles from today’s snarls stretching into the early part of the week, there now will be a Christmas travel crunch. Tens of thousands of passengers are already looking to make new travel arrangements.

As of 7 p.m. Eastern time today, here were some of the numbers of cancellations, according to Flightstats.com:

–Reagan National: 463 arrivals and departures canceled of a total 531 scheduled for the day. Reagan is essentially shut to commercial traffic till tomorrow morning.

–Dulles: 493 canceled of 834 total scheduled.

–Baltimore-Washington: 450 out of 574.

–Philadelphia: 595 of 1,042.

–Newark: 412 out of 1,132.

–LaGuardia: 263 of 640.

–JFK: 407 of 1,170.

The storm was expected to hit the New York area tonight, but as of 7 p.m. Eastern time, less than an inch of snow had fallen, with temperatures around 25 degrees. So it’s apparent that airlines were preemptively canceling flights at the New York airports well before any serious snow accumulation in the area.

[UPDATE: At 10 p.m. Eastern time, the National Weather Service was still predicting a significant amount of snow in blizzard conditions for the New York area overnight.]

On the now evidently small chance that that storm, after clobbering Washington and Philadelphia, peels off into the Atlantic tonight without clobbering Newark, Kennedy or LaGuardia, airlines are going to have some explaining to do about why they canceled so many flights into and out of the New York airports today.

On the other hand, the airlines can defend preemptive cancellations by saying, accurately, that we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. The last thing the airlines want right now is publicity, in the nation’s media capital, about passengers sitting stranded on tarmacs for hours on end, with pictures of little Susie desperately asleep on her Teddy Bear in a darkened idled cabin. If New York gets hit hard by a blizzard, and you’re an airline, your smart play is maybe to keep as many of your planes out of New York as possible, on the bet that the weather reports are accurate. Then you sort it out as best as you can on Sunday and Monday.)

I do wish the airlines the best of luck in sorting this incipient mess out. At airlines’ headquarters right now, some of the best logistical transportation managers in the world are working all night — and all day tomorrow — to get the trains, so to speak, running. I see them now. To me, it sounds like the unexplainabe thrill of running a big newspaper city-desk on a really big breaking story — and then having to argue a day later with some male or female grammar schoolmarm on a news desk who insists that there is no such word as unexplainable, that it’s inexplicable — which is not really the same thing, is it, and I find the idea uneatable. not inedible.

One of these days I need to spend some time reporting on what these men and women at airline headquarters really do, with increasingly limited options, in a weather crisis like this. You and I get to quarterback their results in a couple of days, but they are making the tough calls at this moment.

Meanwhile, delays remain high at Atlanta and the ripple effect is hitting Chicago and other big hubs. Orlando, Miami and Fort Lauderdale are also reporting major delays because of heavy rain.

Most airlines have now put emergency change policies into effect, meaning you can change a flight in affected areas without paying the usual penalty fee. My advice: If you can stay out of the air for the next several days, do it.

By the way, the FAA’s worthless (but supposedly real-time) flight-delays status page at this moment is showing no delays — let alone cancellations — at any of the nation’s airports, even as chaos mounts. What planet is the FAA monitoring? Your tax dollars at work!

###