WASHINGTON (Bloomberg) — US airlines may be forced to increase public disclosure of instances when passengers get stuck in planes on runways, after a rash of those incidents.The disclosure would include delays that occur after a plane leaves a gate and then returns, without taking off. Some airlines currently don't report those delays, the Transportation Department said in a statement yesterday in Washington.

The airlines instead report the second time the flight departs, making it appear there was no long delay, the department said. The approach "disguises inconveniences that the passengers endured", said Donald Bright of the department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

More disclosure might increase pressure on poor-performing carriers to improve, because consumers would have better data when making purchase decisions. Airlines now report many of their runway delays monthly to the government, which then discloses them to the public.

Runway delays drew more attention after an ice storm in New York on February 14, when nine JetBlue Airways Corp. flights were stranded for more than five hours. AMR Corp.'s American Airlines had a combined 80 flights stranded more than three hours following Texas thunderstorms on December 29 and April 24.

Bright, in a Federal Register notice, announced a meeting June 20 with airlines to discuss a possible change in reporting requirements. The notice didn't say which airlines were reporting statistics that disguise passenger inconvenience.

The bureau also will discuss whether to require disclosure of runway delays tied to cancelled flights, which are now excluded from government data, spokesman Dave Smallen said.

Airline passenger groups have been pressing the government to mandate service improvements. One of their goals is more accurate statistics about runway delays.