Gallagher just doesn’t understand what’s really wrong with the legal ramifications of the way airlines treat their passengers.

Consider a restaurant in which you order your meal, pay for it, and are then served. You go into the restaurant and order their “Shore Dinner” (clam chowder, shrimp cocktail, steamed clams, broiled lobster, fries, 2 vegis, beverage and desert). You pay and are seated. Your server comes to your table and says “Sorry, we ran out of potatoes. You’ll have to stay at your table hungry until we can prepare you a full shore dinner”. Indignantly you request a refund. The server tells you that you are not entitled to a refund because what you really paid for was a seat at the table where you would be served your meal, and once you were seated you had no right to a refund as long as you eventually got served if you waited long enough. You ask the server to provide you the rest of the meal without the fries. “No”, says the server, “you paid for the fries as part of the meal and that’s what you’re going to get”. “Then I’ll just leave”, you say, “because I have an important meeting coming up that I can’t miss”. “Oh no, you can’t do that”, your server tells you. “Leaving without eating would be disruptive to food service, and besides nobody is getting served because every meal has fries, and to insure that you all get what you paid for we are locking the doors (and the restrooms which provide an incentive to get up from your table creating a commotion) and nobody will be able to leave until we serve them the full meal they ordered”. Don’t know about you, but at that point I’d pick up my cell phone (if I had one) and call the police saying that I’m being held hostage against my will.

So the Feds think that when I’m in an airplane, I have no right to deplane a parked plane regardless of treatment. If the plane is in flight, allowing passengers to deplane at will would surely be disruptive (to say the least). But while the plane is sitting idle on the ground?

If airlines want to hold passengers in parked planes against their will because to allow them to temporarily deplane would be disruptive to their operations, let them be required to provide at least basic humane services such bathroom facilities that the airlines are required to provide in flight. While the plane is engaged in interstate commerce the Feds have the right to define those requirements. But when the plane is on the tarmac, it’s not involved in interstate anything and the states should have the right to set their own reasonable requirements