Relief in sight for on-board waits over 3 hours?

A Senate committee passed legislation today that would require U.S. airlines to let passengers get off planes that are stranded on the tarmac after three hours. For details see here. Delta is reported by Bloomberg as opposing the rule. Delta passengers might want to complain to Delta about that.

Perhaps Delta wants to hold the world record for longest involuntary confinement of passengers. Their current record as far as I can find is for Delta flight 1201 from Atlanta to Orlando which sat on the tarmac for 10 hours on January 16, 2008. (According to media reports, passengers were denied food, water or temperature controls and reported receiving misleading messages about prospective takeoff times. That last one I don't believe - misleading information about prospective takeoff times. Nah.)

Delta would need to extend their own record by a mere 31 minutes to break the world record, which now belongs to Jet Blue (I believe) for their 10 1/2 hours delay in January 2007 after snow at JFK.

Here's an interesting stat for Delta flyers. According to analysis done by www.flyersrights.org of the USDOT data on diverted commercial airline flights, Delta allowed you to deplane in this situation only about half the time. “If you believe DOT’s statistics, you might avoid American, American Eagle, United and Delta because according to the DOT’s numbers, those four airlines have alone been responsible for 1150 of 1181 instances where passengers were not allowed to deplane at a diverted airport”, said Kate Hanni, FlyersRights.org founder and executive director. Ms. Hanni’s was just one of dozens of flights that were diverted on December 29th, 2006. She and her family were stranded on an American Airlines flight on the airport tarmac in Austin, Texas for over nine hours without food, potable water and usable restrooms. According to the statistics, American Airlines did not allow passengers to deplane 61% of the time. The next closest airline was Delta with 47%. I have no idea why that is.