Three cheers for the US Department of Transportation (DOT)! US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is quoted as saying “When consumers shop for air travel, they have a right to know how much they will have to pay. We will continue to ensure that airlines comply with our price advertising rules.”

The airline, which is based in Tempe Arizona, was hit with a $40,000 fine on March 2010. The US Airways website was found in violation of the strict guidelines handed down from the DOT. The requirements for Internet advertising clearly state, that the full price information must be listed on the first page of the screen that provides the price quotes. Short of this, a hyperlink must be included to take the consumer to a list of taxes and per person fees that will be applied to the final price.

Neither of these options was found on US Airways website for a short period of time, leading several customers to be surprised by additional charges upon checkout. US Airways is Philadelphia’s largest air carrier and serves approximately two thirds of the flying public, so the error had the potential to affect a large number of people.

US Airways has released a statement concerning the issue. They claim that its failure to comply with the Internet advertising rules put forth by the DOT was “wholly unintentional and the result of an inadvertent programming error”. They maintain that the error in fact only ended up affecting a relatively small percentage of customers and that they took “immediate and extensive action to correct the matter” once it was detected.

The fact remains though that US Airways was also slapped with the exact same charge in January 2010. A 7.5% federal excise tax was omitted and only showed up in the final payment due and this error sustained for a period of two and a half days. The programming error was also blamed for the flub in that instance as well.

In August of 2009 US Airways was also found guilty of misrepresenting the final airfare to its customers. Back in August the DOT fined the airline $70,000 but said that it would only have to pay half the fine in the event that there are no more violations.

Needless to say, not only is the full weight of the $70,000 fine now imposed, but US Airways has managed to rack up quite a few more fines in a relatively short period of time.