Air travel literally features little "wiggle room". If you are late to your flight, you can't board. As United Airlines recently demonstrated, if you are "randomly selected" to be kicked off the plane, you will be! The airlines have slots for boarding planes and landing planes, if they miss the slot due to some shock, they wait and you are delayed taking off or de-boarding. If you are stranded at an airport because of logistics issues, you are likely to not be able to find a cheap hotel room.
In a world of uncertainty where shocks do occur, what are your airport rights? If Senators write out such a "bill of rights", then airports and airlines will have to comply and they will pass the costs back to people who fly. Such a bill of rights will be a type of mandated insurance (one payer system!). So, do we allow airlines to be low price and sometimes low quality or do we force all of them to offer a full set of Arrow-Debreu type securities and be higher priced? By this last sentence, I mean the following. Suppose a contingent event occurs such as a terror alert in the airport and all outbound flights are cancelled, must you airline have the ability to find you a free hotel room within a 10 mile radius on that night in the next 35 minutes? That would be a type of contingency event!
If airlines had to provide this, you would not be sleeping on the airport floor and searching for a clean toliet but your airplane ticket would be more expensive. Who bears the risk? You or the airline? Given the scale of air travel, perhaps the airlines should be bearing more of this risk. Now, Milton Friedman would say that if you have a choice over which carriers fly routes then you will substitute away from the low quality carrier and this provides proper incentives to provide a good, cheap ride with contingent perks. Why is this free market point wrong in the airline case? Are people underestimating the probability of nasty contingencies and thus undervaluing part of the quality of airline service?
Suppose the airlines wrote out a contingent contract where they state how much $ they will give you if the flight is delayed or they cancel the flight or kick you off. In expected value, how much would this cost the airline? Would this private contract impress customers or do air travelers have state dependent preferences such that they don't value $ when they are traveling and delayed? Or are there so many contingencies that an airline couldn't write them all out? The actuaries must be able to calculate the probability of all of the main "bad events"? So, now I'm thinking that no government intervention is needed here on routes that have at least 2 carriers.