NEW YORK — Through the end of this year, a jet pulled from service for an unscheduled repair will keep being counted as the airline’s own doing in federal delay data. The U.S. Department of Transportation said in a notice published Thursday that it is pushing back, from October 19 to February 1, 2027, a rule that would take that kind of delay, and nine others, out of the category reserved for circumstances within a carrier’s control.
The reprieve was the industry’s request. Airlines for America, the carriers’ trade group, asked on September 21 for the later date, according to the notice, saying airlines and the department’s statistics bureau need time to update their systems. The department agreed, and says reporting under the new categories will apply to flights on or after January 1, 2027.
The rule implements Section 511(b) of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, which says ten kinds of events “shall not be included within the Air Carrier code.” Besides unscheduled maintenance that “cannot be deferred or must be addressed before flight,” the list covers the removal of an unruly passenger, a medical emergency through no fault of the carrier, cybersecurity attacks where the airline complies with the regulations, and airport closures caused by volcanic ash, wind or wind shear.
What that means at the gate is in the department’s own analysis. When it published the rule on September 3, it said all the reporting carriers that sell tickets “currently commit to providing amenities at no cost to consumers for lengthy controllable delays and controllable cancellations.” With ten causes carved out, “the number of delays and cancellations for which air carriers provide amenities and compensation to consumers is expected to be reduced.” The department called that “a transfer of value from consumers back to air carriers.”
How large the transfer is, nobody has said. The department states that the reduction “cannot be reliably estimated,” mainly because it “does not have visibility into the frequency of the 10 delineated causes.” The delay itself came without public comment. In its notice in the Federal Register, the department invoked the good-cause exception, saying it “only recently became aware of air carriers’ need to delay the final rule.”
The postponement leaves a bigger retreat untouched. In November 2025 the department formally withdrew a Biden-era proposal that would have made airlines pay $200 to $300 for domestic delays of at least three hours, CBS News reported. A separate category for air traffic control delays, also ordered by the 2024 law, will need its own rulemaking, the bureau says.
TEH could not obtain the text of Airlines for America’s letter, so the industry’s case is as the department summarised it. Nor did we find any airline saying publicly how it will treat a broken aircraft once the new categories start.
