Four American Airlines flights landed at Baltimore-Washington International Airport Thursday night and had nowhere to go: All the American gates were full, so the planes sat on the tarmac for up to three hours - while incensed passengers plotted ways to break free.

One man on a flight from Boston wondered aloud if faking a heart attack would force someone to find them a gate. Another called American on his cell phone and demanded to be read the airline's passenger bill of rights.

"It was ridiculous," said Suzanne Langley, who was on an American flight that landed at 8 p.m. and didn't reach a gate until 11. "What was frustrating was that our plane had to keep moving to allow other planes into their bays, like Continental and Southwest."

BWI officials said they weren't aware of the situation until a passenger on one of the planes called from her cell phone to let them know what was going on. The planes were then directed to unused US Airways gates.

"If we knew the passengers were waiting there for more than an hour, we would have done something," said BWI spokeswoman Melanie Miller. "We would never want any passengers sitting on a tarmac. It's not how you treat a human being."

But American officials said they were in contact with the airport about their gate problems, and they blamed BWI for plowing piles of snow in front of American jets parked at gates Thursday night.

"We couldn't get fuel trucks in to fuel the planes [so they could move] because the snow mounds were in the way," said American spokesman John Hotard. He said BWI officials spoke to all the airlines today to "apologize for their part in this."

Runway conditions

Other airlines also had trouble with BWI's snow removal. Several Southwest planes aborted takeoffs Thursday because there was too much snow and slush on the runways, and other planes that did take off were damaged by the poor runway conditions, said a Southwest spokeswoman.

BWI managers were looking into those problems yesterday and making other adjustments in the wake of the biggest snowstorm to hit the region in almost three years. More than a third of BWI's 700 daily flights were canceled Thursday and hundreds more were delayed.

A "substantial number" of passengers were forced to spend Thursday night in the airport as nearby hotels filled up, Miller said. She said the airport will work with the airlines to identify more hotels that can take stranded passengers.

"We need to expand the base of hotels we can send passengers to, so when hotels are full around the airport we can take them somewhere else," Miller said. She added that many passengers chose to sleep in the airport to avoid the hassle of finding a hotel in the snow.

Flight 4751

But it seems one of the biggest hassles of the day was faced by passengers on Flight 4751 of American Eagle, the commuter division of American Airlines. The flight left Boston at 6 p.m. Thursday and landed at BWI around 8, passengers said.

The plane taxied toward the terminal, then stopped and waited. And waited. The 40 passengers on board were offered beverages and snacks, but the provisions quickly ran out.

Passengers said the pilot told them no American gates were available and that some planes at those gates could not back out because they were blocked in by plowed snow. American has four gates at BWI.

"For the first hour, everyone was fairly patient. They were just glad the flight wasn't canceled," said Langley, 46, who is from Little Rock, Ark. "But then people started getting louder and louder and you could tell the pilot was frustrated. We were close enough to walk [to a gate] and we couldn't get off."

Passengers finally deplaned at 11:10 p.m., then had to wait an hour for their luggage to come out. Langley and her daughter, who are spending the week visiting schools in the Northeast, didn't get to their hotel in Washington until 2 a.m.

American Airlines officials said they could not identify all the flights that were stuck on the tarmac, but said there were "at least four" of them.

Thursday "was not a typical operational day," said American spokeswoman Tara Baten. "It is not normal for our passengers to wait for gates for two hours, but in this instance, unfortunately, there may not have been gates available."

Planes are sometimes held up on the tarmac during electrical storms for safety reasons: Ground crews don't want to get near the metal of the jetways and airplanes during heavy lightning. But that wasn't the case at BWI Thursday night.

"I don't think there's much of an excuse," said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association. "There were clearly places in that airport where they could have taken those passengers."