James Lileks: Get me out of this stinky flying tube

The story of the Continental flight crew that held passengers captive on the plane has horrified everyone, and well it should. Cooped up in a metal tube, unable to leave, choked by the suffocating miasma of busted toilets and ripe diapers: there's a word for that. Amtrak. Planes are supposed to be better.

I'm not kidding about Amtrak. I love trains, and have taken many trips on the Empire Builder and the old 20th Century Limited. (The Unlimited kept shooting past New York into the Atlantic, and was eventually discontinued.) Some trains in the winter had frozen loos and busted waste disposal mechanisms, and after a long night it was like riding a 14-car Diaper Genie. They'd run out of food. The smoke from the bar car would give a mummy emphysema.

I like to fly now. But if I had to sit on a plane so long I finished a six-movie Star Wars marathon on the laptop, I would be able to cut through the fuselage with white-hot glares of rage. Put it this way: the Dalai Lama is on the plane. He's having chest pains. He needs to get to the terminal. What would the tower say? "Confirm he can reincarnate, over," probably. Make it the pope. Make it anyone who's more important than the average piece of meat-in-a-seat, as you suspect some airline folk call us. They'd find a way to get him off the plane.

Since anecdotes like this inevitably lead to broad laws, there's talk of drafting a Flier's Bill of Rights. Presumably you could set it on fire and force them to evacuate the plane. But it sounds nice, as long as I get to write it.

If, after 12 hours, a fresh crew is not found to drive the plane to the jetway, whoever has the most experience on Microsoft Flight Simulator shall be allowed to take the controls.

Passengers shall not be required to view the sight of your enormous hairy clodhoppers in flip-flops, hanging out in the aisle. Dude. Seriously.

Upon encountering turbulence, a mild, fast-acting anesthetic gas smelling of fresh-mowed grass shall be available to any who request it.

Flight attendants shall be permitted to remove from the plane anyone who tries to stuff a partly disassembled grand piano in an overhead bin.

A blow-up replica of shoe-bomber Richard Reid shall sit at security checkpoints, so passengers may give his effigy a snout-punch after retrieving their footwear from the X-ray machine.

And so on. Or maybe not. A "Flier's Bill of Rights" is a nifty-sounding thing, but any additional Bills of Rights tend to diminish the actual, important Bill of Rights. It's one thing to assert you have a First Amendment right to free speech; people know what you mean. It's another to complain to a court that Lady Foot Locker's refusal to exchange some socks violates the third plank in the Shoe-buyer's Bill of Rights, enacted after the famous Wing-Tip Scandals of '11. Besides, the Bill of Rights are amendments, so a Flier's version would have to be appended to a Constitution. We the people, in order to have a more perfect day, would like to get out of here before the guy in the next seat who loaded up on nachos seven hours ago starts burping again. Doesn't have the same majesty. Surely you've seen pictures of air travel in the glamor days: people walking across the tarmac, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, dressed like they're going to Audrey Hepburn's birthday party. They left the same way, disembarking like royalty. Now you shuffle through the metal chute, half-expecting a butcher with a bolt gun at the other end. I'm not saying we have an inalienable right to walk down the steps like the Beatles at Idlewild. But the right to stretch your legs? You'd think so. Wouldn't you.